Week 3

In week 3, we began our unit on fairy tales. One of the first books we read was Goldilocks and the Three Bears. 

We were all pretty familiar with this book. One thing we learned was that there are three ways to read a book. You can read the words, you can read the pictures, or you can retell the story. Mrs. Langham read us one book and then we compared the illustrations in the other stories. We were still able to retell the story without reading the book just by looking at the pictures.

We also had fun acting out the story with puppets. This is another way to retell the story. We had so much fun pretending to be Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Aren't they precious?

One of our favorite versions of the story was Somebody and the Three Blairs. This book had a bear (Somebody) go into a human house (The Blair family). It was pretty silly.

A math activity we did with the three bears was a sorting activity by size.

The next fairy tale that we learned about was The Three Billy Goats Gruff. We read these books by reading the words, reading the pictures or retelling the story.

We also had fun using our puppets to retell the story.

And we acted it out by crossing the balance beam bridge. Watch out for the troll!

We made our own puppets and setting so we could act out the story at home.

Rumpelstiltskin was new to many students. We enjoyed hearing this story.

We loved adding straw and gold to our illustrations of this story.

The final story we heard this week was Hansel and Gretel.

Our focus book this week was Hands Can. This was an easy reader that helped the children learn our sight word "can".

We learned a song to teach us how to spell can and did many activities. One of our favorites is called Pokey Pin. We used a push pin to poke out the letters in the word "can". We liked the design it made on our paper and it helped develop our fine motor skills and our tripod grip.

We continue to get better at sounding out words in writer's workshop. Our lessons this week focused on organization and turning pages without skipping them. A funny book we read was called The Monster at the End of the Book. Ask your child about this one.

We learned about our left and right hands and applied it to the pages we write in our journals.

And we talked about the top and bottom. We always want to start our letters at the top and read beginning at the top.

Our poem of the week was popular in the pocket chart. It is the Name Chant. Thank you for sending in environmental print. We had fun with this one and will leave it up another week.

We have been asking to go to centers and were able to do some literacy centers this week. We still need to work on our noise control to earn them back, but did a great job at clean up.

We had a special visitor this week. Zero the Hero came on the 10th day of school. He loves to visit on days that end in his favorite number, zero.

We worked on a special book to represent the number ten.

We used a counting jar and practiced estimating and counting out a given number. We used our math journals for the first time to record information and to represent numbers.

In math, we explored buttons. We looked at their attributes and found different ways to sort them. We sorted by color, size, button holes and materials they were made from.

In the story, The Button Box, we learned other ways we could sort buttons.

Learning about sorting buttons was fun. It made it easier when we learned how to sort attribute blocks. We were each given a shape and we had to describe it with shape, color, size and thickness.

We each got to choose a ball and describe it.

When we were given a ball, we had lots of ideas to describe its attributes. Just look at the list we came up with.

We got partners in math and were able to enjoy our math workstations after completing our work this week. 

In social studies, we are still learning how to follow the rules and the importance of having rules. We watched a video called "Mind Your Manners at School" and we also watched "Your Job is Going to School". We read a couple of books about following rules and keeping our hands to ourselves.

In science, we finished up our unit on using tools and making predictions with an awesome experiment. We predicted what would happen if you put Mentos and M&Ms in Diet Coke. We learned that the Mentos have holes in them. Diet Coke seeps into the holes and causes gas to be released. The gas made the Diet Coke shoot out of the bottle. The M&Ms do not have the holes, so it only made a smaller release. I love the looks on their faces in these pictures. It was a blast, literally!

We moved on to a new unit in science, the five senses.

We read a few books about sight (which I forgot to take pictures of) and learned how the eye works. We learned the parts of the eye and how your eyes send messages to your brain. Your eyes work like a camera, taking the picture and telling you what to do or how to react. We got to touch a braille book and learn how blind people read. We also graphed our eye color.

We read about smelling and how it works similar to sight by sending messages from your nerves to your brain. There are tiny hairs inside our nasal cavity that help determine the smell.

We discussed good and bad smells. We got to use smelling jars and try to guess the smell using our senses.

Don't forget that book orders are due on Monday. It is always very special for your child to receive their own book at school and it really helps to encourage reading at home. 

Picture day is on Wednesday. Please remember that orders are by pre-pay only. Our picture time is at 8:20, so please be on time for school that day. 

If you haven't signed up for a conference, look at the tab at the top of the blog labeled fall conferences to see what is available. Then e-mail Mrs. Langham with your preferred time. She will confirm your appointment.