Ezra Jack Keats Author Study!

We have had a busy week reading stories written by Ezra Jack Keats!  Here are some of the important things we did… 

   We engaged in an Ezra Jack Keats Author Study. He broke the color barrier in children’s 

literature with the mainstream success of The Snowy Day, in 1962.  He believed that all 

children should be able to see themselves in the books they love. We agree!

Our centers this week included:

-Word Work center: We wrote CVC words on Magna Doodles.  Some of us wrote words 

with blends and digraphs!

-Reading Group with Mrs. Dennett

-RAZKids at iPad center

-ABC center: We played CVC games and practiced reading and building CVC words

-Write the Room center: We found power words around our classroom and 

practiced reading them and writing them.

Theme center: We made our own Peter's from The Snowy Day and wrote about what we 

like to do when it snows.

Our writing lessons this week focused on hearing and discussing good writing, visualizing 

and writing about animals, telling our ideas orally before writing, remembering to

write from left to right and leave spaces between words, and using sound spelling and our

sound and word wall to help us.

In this week’s Second Steps lesson, we learned two ways to help ourselves feel calm when we encounter strong feelings: asking for help and slow breathing. Ask your child to tell you some ways they’ve learned  to feel calm when they get upset. Have them teach you how to use slow breathing to feel calm.

In Reading, we were introduced to the comprehension strategy of visualizing. We made inferences to a poem about cats and drew the pictures we made in our minds as we listened to the poem. We make tet to self connections to a story, talked about punctuation marks, echo read to build oral fluency, and learned to self monitor for comprehension while reading independently. 

During Phonics this week, we focused on tapping out sounds and switching out beginning and ending sounds in words. We wrote the sounds we hear. We talked about punctuation as well. 

We started our shapes unit in Math! This week, we learned about flat shapes (triangle, circle, rectangle, square, hexagon) and solid shapes (cone, cube, pyramid, sphere, cylinder). Ask your child to teach them to you!

Looking ahead...

Holiday Happiness Drive ends 12/18

Winter Party 12/20

Early Release Day 12/20

Winter Break 12/21-1/3

School Resumes 1/4

Have a great weekend! 

Jena