This week

Parents/guardians,

I apologize for not getting this out by Sunday night the past couple of weeks. I will try my best to post on Sunday nights so you all know what to expect for the week. Thanks again for the classroom donations. We should have enough disinfecting wipes to get through the cold season now! Besides having the time of our lives being in wonderful community with each other, this is what is going on in room 110 this week.

Reading:
We are reading Life in an Ocean. This book is piggy backing off Animal Homes from last week. We did a great partner sorting activity today where the students sorted the animals by where they live. The kids are getting really into this unit already and are expanding their vocabularies with words like: predator, prey, shallow, hibernate and nocturnal. This is the second week I have been meeting with small reading groups. This has been great for the kids to get more attention with students at their same level. In most groups, we are learning the steps to solving words we don't know in the text. Here is the progression so you can teach it at home: sound it out, use the picture, skip it and read the sentence without the word in it.

*Last week we started the Daily 5 which has been going great. We do it from 10-11:15ish each day. It is similar to centers but the five stations never change names (only the writing task and word work task change weekly). Here is what the Daily 5 includes: read to self, read to someone, listen to reading, word work, work on writing and meet with Mr. E. We have also been given an aid that comes in the room daily from 10-11. (which is why I changed the times and no longer need parent volunteers) The students do three rounds a day so they don't do everything daily but they get to all the spots over the span of one week.

Writing:
We are learning how to write sentence (capital, spaces, ending mark). This week we are writing about things we see in the classroom. I have also started introducing story webs so students can organize their ideas before writing.

Math:
We are composing and decomposing numbers, which are essential skills (number knowledge) for adding and subtracting later in the year.

Science:
Animals. We have a class frog named Fin (Finny). They love him. All students will get the opportunity to take Fin home for a weekend or night and take care of him. Their is a journal that travels with him too.

I sent home stuff last week. The writing journals (prompt journal and "free" journal) stay home. If your child brought home a green or yellow word book please send it back to school so they can use it during writing the rest of the year.

Mr. E