Welcome back to a new year!  We have settled in and have enjoyed a nice three day weekend!  We are definitely off and running with our new semester.  It is hard to believe, but this week is our 100th week of school.  The official day is this Thursday.  We have a lot of fun activities planned for the week.  We are going to be making books with 100 words, filling out a 100 number chart, making predictions and then actually counting to see where 100 steps will get us, drawing our selves at 100, and many more fun activities!

During social studies, we are learning about "What is in my neighborhood?"  We have had a lot of great discussion to describe the many different buildings, sights, and places you might find in a neighborhood.  We have had a lot of great moments when the kids realize that their neighborhood doesn't have the same things as some of the other children in our classroom.

We have kicked off a new writing unit in class.  We are learning to write "how-to" stories.  These are stories that teach a reader something.  We have learned that these types of stories are "bossy", they have steps, the steps are labeled, and there is picture for each step.  Some popular stories have been how to make a pbj sandwich, how to ride a bike, and how to build with Legos.

During some of our writing time we have also been writing about winter.  Even though we don't seem to have a lot of snow these days, it has been fun writing about snowmen and all things winter.  Next week, we will be working the topic of penguins.  We are doing some work with being able to tell fiction stories apart from non-fiction stories.  We will continue to work on this topic next week in class. 

Finally, during our OG time we have been working on the -ng sound.  These are words with -ang, -ing, -ong, and -ung at the end.  It has been great to really challenge the children to come up with words that would have these ending sounds.  We have also started to work really hard at sentence dictation.  This is embedded in our OG time and it is meant to practice all of the skills that we have learned up to this point.  We practice sight words, finger spelling unknown words, and practice writing a complete sentence.  We use what we call our COPS rules.  This is where we look at the sentence when finished and make sure there are capitals, punctuation, word wall words, and spelling in the correct spots.  When we do find an error, we give that error a "ticket" and everyone has a goal of zero tickets on their sentence each day.  I have told the kids this is why the list of sight words is so important to learn because it helps when writing words down quickly.

This Friday will be a binder check in day.  Please have all binders turned in to me so I can update them and check in on the goals.  Thanks!

Have a great week!