February 26th - March 2nd

Happy Friday! It was so good to see a lot of you at math night on Wednesday! Thank you to everyone who came out to learn more about how we run math workshop in our classroom.  It was fun watching the students teach all of you how to play the games.  Below are some announcements for the weeks ahead and then a review of our week!

March 5th-9th Dr. Seuss Spirit Week! Today is Dr. Seuss' birthday and we are studying him next week during our "Author in Me" unit.  We will celebrate a different Dr. Seuss book each day and will dress accordingly to make it fun! Below is the schedule:
            Monday: Fox in Socks Day...wear silly or mismatched socks
            Tuesday: Green Eggs and ham Day...wear the color green
           Wednesday: Wacky Wednesday...wear your wackiest hairdo and/or outfit to school
            Thursday: The Cat in the Hat Day...wear your favorite hat to school
            Friday: Read My Shirt Day...wear a shirt that others can read
March 16th: We will celebrate St. Patrick's Day on the 16th in class (since we will not be at school on the 17th) and we are going to try and catch the leprechaun! The kids are already SO excited to make their leprechaun traps! They can use any box (cereal, shoe, amazon, etc.) to use as the base for their trap and they can decorate it however they want!  Anything green, gold, and rainbow would be awesome!  Please have your child bring this is on Friday, March 16th. 😉
March 30th-April 8th: Spring break!

***Please write your child's name in their jackets that come to school.  It will help us with keeping them all straight and in the event they lost it or leave it on the playground. Thank you!

Math

As most of you saw at math night, the main concepts that we are focusing on now are counting on, one more vs one less, addition, number writing, and equation writing.  We are doing a mixture of math tubs some days and other days doing range cards.

Literacy

During reader's workshop this week, we learned two new Beanie Baby Strategies! The first one is "Stretchy Snake" and he tells us to "s-t-r-e-t-c-h" out the word slowly and say each little sound that we hear.  Once you stretch it out, you put the sounds back together and say it fast to see if you can figure out the word.  We also learned about "Chunky Monkey"who tells us to "chunk the word."  Look for a chunk that you already know such as  -ing, -and, -an, -old, etc.  You also look for a word part that you may know such as -an, -at, -ed, -be-, -er, etc.  The students did wonderful using these strategies during our guided reading groups!  We also did another week of word sorts.  Your child is in one of four groups and they did one of the following word sorts:
1. matching pictures to words for the -at word family
2. sorting based on short e, i, o, u
3. sorting wh vs. th
4. short o vs. long o

Thematic

We began our Author in Me thematic unit this week and started with Eric Carle!  We read many different Eric Carle books and discussed what makes his books special and the common themes that they have.  The students rotated through four centers:
1. Mister Seahorse: shaving cream seahorses
2. The Tiny Seed: fruit and veggie seed investigations
3. Papa, Please Get the Moon for Me: learning about the phases of the moon and art craft
4. A House for Hermit Crab: sand art activity

Science

Because we are studying Eric Carle currently, we read the book The Tiny Seed and did a seed investigation!  We cut open apples, oranges, grapes, strawberries, blueberries, and cucumbers and studied the different sizes and amounts of seeds.  We used a recording sheet and practiced spelling the names phonetically.

Have a great weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James