Week 8

It was nice talking to all parents during conferences. Thank you for taking part of your day to share your time with me. I love bragging on your children. Even though it was a short week, we accomplished a lot!

In language arts, our letter of the week was Ss. Silly Snake helped us to learn that letter.

Our sight word this week was "like". We made many sight word books this week and we learned a reading strategy. Eagle Eye teaches us to look at the pictures to help figure out the word. 

Our focus book this week was What Do You Like? We were able to figure out the pattern in this book and look at the pictures to help us read this book.

During writing, we are learning to put spaces between our words. We also want to work on our illustrations. We learned that an illustrator draws. We paid close attention to the illustrations in this story and noticed how the illustrator uses many colors and shades when drawing.

Thank you for bringing in apples this week. We read a few books to learn about apples.

We loved the riddle about the Little Red House and enjoyed making these books too.

We were surprised that an apple had a star in the middle.

Our poem of the week was also about apples. We added this poem to our poetry notebook. It also helped us to learn our counting skills.

We learned the parts of an apple and we made our own and labeled them.

We read the book Ten Apples Up on Top.

After reading this book, we had to try to balance an apple on our head. Some of us were quite good at this.

We illustrated ourselves with apples on our head and practiced counting them too.

We loved tasting apples and graphing our favorite. 

We finished our week with apple centers.

In math, we practiced our counting skills. We are counting up to 100 in class and backward from 20. When we are counting objects, we learned to line them up, move them and point. We can go back and check our counting to make sure we are right. We read some counting books. We also worked on writing our numbers.

We had the most fun learning how to play our new math work stations and practicing our counting.

In science, we have been talking about the physical states of matter. We learned that heating and cooling things can change these states. We had a lot of fun with our ice balloon experiment. We got to explore the ice. We looked at it with a flashlight and got to see cracks and air bubbles within the ice. We put salt on it and learned that salt can melt ice. We also colored the ice to be able to magnify these changes. We predicted whether the ice would sink or float and then learned why it floated. We got to see the water ring left by the water. The water is warmer than the ice. We compared this to an iceberg too. We had so much fun exploring. We even noticed that our blue water turned green after we added yellow food coloring. 

We left the ice balloons out on our table and watched them melt throughout the day.

We learned that heat can change the shape of many objects and make physical changes. We matched objects and how they change after heat is added.

Then we did an experiment where we added heat. I had intended for this experiment to be done outside with the sunshine, but Mother Nature did not cooperate this week. Instead, we used an electric skillet. It was neat to see not only how heat melted many of these objects into liquids, but also when they cooled, they turned back to a solid.

We had fun adding heat to Ivory soap. We predicted it would melt in the microwave, but look what happened!!! Science is so cool.

Our last experiment was delicious. We got to see how heat changed batter into cake. We enjoyed eating them too, of course!

On Friday, we got to enjoy a visit by Mother Goose. She told us many of her nursery rhymes and acted them out with props. 

Next week we will be learning about pumpkins. Report cards will come home on Friday.