Week 11

This week in language arts, we learned the letter Tt with the help of Tommy Tiger. Our sight words were "see" and "at". 

Our focus book was A Bus for Us. We worked on making predictions with this book. 

We learned a new song to help us remember what character and setting are. We identified them in many books we read this week and recorded them in our reading journals.

You can listen to the song here:

Parts of a Story Song

Our poem of the week was a new version of the Itsy Bitsy Spider. We had fun plugging our names into the poem.

In writing, we learned how we can revise our books that we are writing. We have some great stories already from some of our students.

We enjoyed time in our literacy centers.

Spiders are fascinating to us. We wrote down what we already know about spiders.

We watched a Magic School Bus video about spiders and read many books. We confirmed true facts about spiders and crossed out the incorrect facts.

One of our favorite characters this week was Anansi the spider. We read this book several times.

In math we made sets from 1-5 and also from 6-10.

We talked about positional words and illustrated them in our Very Busy Spider book.

We read a book about comparing numbers and learned the terms "more" and "fewer".

In social studies, we learned about Veteran's Day. We had a special assembly Friday morning to honor our Veterans.

Ms. Phillips came with Can-Do and Will-Do to talk to us about the importance of listening. We are still working on this skill in class.

In science, we learned about Force,  Motion and Movement. We enjoyed these books. We learned about gravity and friction too.

It was even more fun to explore how things move and different ways that we can add force to make things move.

We have been waiting all year to meet our 3rd grade buddy class. We are teaming up with Mrs. Armstrong's class. The 3rd grade students came to our class and read to the students. We will be meeting regularly now. Your child was assigned a buddy that will become like a big brother/sister to them. Very neat relationships will develop over the year with this class.

Don't forget that there is no school on Monday to honor our Veterans. Also, book orders that were sent home today will be due on Friday, November 15th. Enjoy your long weekend!

Week 10

Happy November! It seems like we were just starting October. Where did the time go? We stayed very busy this week, but between having a sub and Halloween, I didn't get as many pictures this week of all our accomplishments. It was "batty". 

We had a review week in language arts. We reviewed the letters we have learned and also the sight words, so no new words were added this week. Our focus book of the week was Simon, Molly and Hester. We focused on characters, problem and solution. We also have been reading fables and learning about the lesson that these fables have taught us. One we read this week was The City Mouse and the Country Mouse. 

We had some fun learning the poem Five Little Pumpkins and illustrating it too.

We worked on the "at" word family this week.

In writing, we learned to takes risks with our writing and try hard to write pictures and words. We compared this to the book The Little Engine That Could. We helped Mrs. Langham draw a picture of a someone standing on their head and also writing the word "balance beam" by stretching out the sounds we hear in words.

We began to make our writing into books. We worked with our writing partners to help us talk through stories.

This week, we learned about bats. We read the book, Stellaluna.

We made a Stellaluna puppet.

The students brainstormed a list of what they already knew about bats. Mrs. Langham wrote their ideas down.

After reading several books about bats, we checked off what we read to be true from our list.

We had fun making our bat craft and facts which are displayed outside our classroom.

Then we took the information that we learned and put it into a non-fiction book about bats. We had fun putting the words together and illustrating the information that we learned.

In math, we worked on our numbers from 6-9. We also worked on decomposing the numbers, which is the beginning form of addition.

In science, we learned about magnets. We learned that magnets are a form of energy that causes movement. The force of a magnet can push or pull an object. We learned about the north and south poles of a magnet and how they can attract or repel. Did you know the Earth is a magnet too?

Then we got to explore using magnets.

We had a lot of indoor time this week due to the rain, so that meant that we got to go to centers often too. We also watched a Magic School Bus video about bats.

Thank you to those that have returned the yellow report card envelopes. I still am missing a few more, so if you haven't returned yours, please do so. Also, picture retakes are on November 6th, so if you are not happy with your child's portrait, simply return the package and they can have their picture taken again.