Thursday, September 25, 2025

Kevin Henkes Author Study!

  

What a very busy week we've had!  Here are some of the important things we learned...

We read books by one of our favorite authors, Kevin Henkes!  Some of the books we read include ChrysanthemumLilly’s Purple Plastic PurseOwenSheila Rae the BraveWemberly WorriedChester’s WayJulius the Baby of the World and many more!  We completed many follow up activities at centers such as answering text to self and text to text connections, talking about our favorite main character, and recalling details from our favorite stories.

We officially started literacy centers! The centers themselves will not change each week but the activity at the center will change.  The new centers are RAZkids/iPad center, theme center, word work center, sensory bin center, write the room/writing center, and ABC center. We also added Reading group center. The children are learning how to read the work board and find their center in our classroom using the pictures on the work board.  

Our centers and reading tasks this week included LOTS of fun activities with tricky skills! We read in the independent reading area, played beginning sound games and roll a sight word, and explored CCPal and Dreambox on the iPad.  We wrote a response to Wemberly Worried and made text to self connections with Chrysanthemum. We found various beginning sounds at our "Write the Room" center and recorded what sounds we read.  At Reading Group, we worked on blending and segmenting words. 

In Writing, we listened to and discussed a nonfiction book called City Signs and read written words in our environment (environmental print).  We labeled classroom objects and generated ideas about places we like to go and wrote about them. We practiced telling our idea orally to our partners and then recorded the sounds that we heard in each word.  Please continue to work with your child on stretching out words and hearing each sound (we practice this by pretending that we are blowing a bubble and we stretch it out). 

During Phonics, we worked on letters and sounds for Bb, Tt, and Ii. We revisited the power words "a" and "the".  We also identified words and pictures by their beginning sounds and practiced blending sounds to read words. 

Our Reading lessons this week taught us the high frequency words "are" and "we". We practiced writing, spelling, and reading them. "Are" is a very tricky sight word that has two heart parts.  Ask your child to tell you what that means! We continued to work on reading independently from our book boxes.  We also learned the poems "The More We Get Together", "1,2,3,4,5" and "Way Down South".

We continued our unit on numbers to 10 in Math.  Next week, we will wrap up and move onto our next unit on measurement.  Please continue writing numbers at home with your child. 

In this week’s lesson, we learned to use body language and context clues to figure out when someone feels happy. We practiced looking at the person’s face and body, as well as thinking about what’s going on in the situation. Encourage your child to notice when others around them feel happy. Have them practice using body language and context clues to figure out when family members, friends, or characters in books, movies, or on TV might be feeling happy.

We had Enrichment with Mrs. Knoot and STEAM with Mrs. Bradley! 

We started our first Science unit this week! We investigated what lives in the rainforest and made observations to find patterns to help us figure out what plants and animals need to survive and grow. We talked about living and nonliving things. We used models to represent the relationships between the needs of the different plants and animals and the environment where they live.

    Looking ahead...

    Panther Day 10/3
    Scholastic Orders due 10/8
    Parent Teacher Conferences 10/14 and 10/15
    Early Release Day 10/16
    No School 10/17
    No School 10/20
    Field Trip to Eckerts 10/23

    Please send in a framed picture of your family.

    Don't forget to empty your child's folder each evening and send a snack everyday.




















































    Have a great weekend!

    Jena