Happy Valentine's Day!

 

We had a short but busy week getting ready for Valentine's Day! Here are some of the important things we learned...

Our centers this week included finding and writing blends, writing about people and things we love, building words with blends and digraphs, reading and writing power words, and writing valentines to people we love. 

In reading, we continued to focus on strengthening our informational reading skills. We read nonfiction texts to learn new information, practiced asking and answering questions, and identified key ideas and important details. We also learned how to use text features such as headings, photographs, and captions to better understand what we read. 

We continued to work on adding details to our nonfiction stories during writing.  We are working on using punctuation, capitalization,  and adding more sentences to make our writing better. 

In this week’s Second Steps lesson, we learned how to state a problem without blame or name calling. We practiced identifying problems in given scenarios, listening to the teacher state the problem, and then repeating the statement.  Children may be tempted to blame others when they’re upset about something. Encourage your child to avoid blame by describing what happened without focusing on who is at fault.

We continued to practice subtracting in Math.  This has proven to be very tricky for us.  Please help you child at home by encouraging them to use their fingers, cross out pictures, count down, etc. Thanks for your help! 

We learned about Black History Month during Social Studies and why it is important to honor and celebrate the contributions of Black leaders throughout history. We focused on Rosa Parks and talked about how her courage and choices helped create change. We had thoughtful conversations about fairness, kindness, and standing up for what is right. 

We had fun at our Valentine party! Pictures coming soon!

Looking ahead...

No School- Professional Development 2/13
No School- President's Day 2/16

Don't forget to send a letter in for your child over the next couple of weeks for our Post Office Unit. 

Have a great, long weekend! See you Tuesday!

Jena

Happy 100th Day!

 

 We had fun celebrating the 100th Day of School this week! 

Our literacy centers included activities that focus on words that begin and end with blends, counting to 100 activities and writing about various 100th day topics.

In Phonics, we learned to add double consonants to short vowel words (the floss rule).  We practiced reading and writing words that end with this rule. Examples of this are ff, ll, zz, and ss. We learned two new power words:  all and off. We continued working on blends and digraphs. 

In Reading, we continued our exploration of places in our community by listening to nonfiction books about libraries. We discussed information we learned about the topic and made text-to-self and text-to-text connections.  We revisited some familiar big books, reviewed punctuation and rhyme, and echo read to build our oral fluency. Our vocabulary words this week were: study, curious, organize, and reorganize. 

During Writing, we listened to a nonfiction book about vegetables and made observations about various foods.  This helped us brainstorm lots of details for our nonfiction writing. We also talked about the inflectional endings -s and -es in plural nouns. We worked on punctuation at the end of our sentences. 

We started our subtraction unit in Math.  We are starting to understand and represent subtraction as taking apart.  We will continue working on subtraction over the month of February.  Please continue adding and subtracting with your child at home. 

We had fun building galimotos during Science! Ask your child to tell you all about it! 

We had so much fun playing together during Global Play Day!  Pics are below!

Looking ahead...

Valentine's Day Party 2/12 (please let me know if you child needs to make valentines or a bag to hold them in here at school)
No School- Professional Development 2/13
No School- President's Day 2/16

Don't forget to send a letter in for your child over the next couple of weeks for our Post Office Unit. 

Have a great weekend! 

Jena