All About Ezra Jack Keats

 

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 reading and writing CVC words, going to Reading Group with Mrs. Dennett, reading books on RAZKids at iPad center, playing CVC games and practicing reading and building CVC words, finding power words around our classroom and 

practicing reading them and writing them, and making our own Peter's from The Snowy Day and writing 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 revisited the sounds for /t/ and /n/, learned the word "play", added the -s ending to make words plural, and wrote about the story Sam and Nan Play.

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!

We wrapped up our Science unit and are looking forward to learning about holidays around the world during Social Studies starting next week! 

Looking ahead...

Holiday Happiness Drive 11/13-12/16 (please see your email from Dr. Schreiner for more info)

No School- Thanksgiving Break- 11/27-11/29

Scholastic Book Fair Family Night 12/2

KD Class Visit to the Book Fair 12/4

Early Release Day 12/20

Winter Break 12/23-1/7

Have a great weekend!

Jena