Hello December

A look at our learning this week...

Fundations: now that we are all letter experts, we will use that knowledge to help us "tap out" words when reading, writing and spelling non word wall words.  

Please see the Fundations note in the Friday Folder for more information on this.  

It is important for you to encourage your child to "tap out" words when reading and writing at home as well.  The more consistent we are with our language and strategies between home and school, the easier it will be for the students to learn this new and important skill.

Shared Reading: we read the poem Mary had a little lamb and read the big book A Day For Dad to help us with our new spelling words had and dad.  When we come to an unknown word in a book, we are carrying over our learning from Fundations to "tap it out."  This is a skill they can use if it is a 2, 3 or 4 letter word.  We also continue to look at the picture to help us with unknown words.  

Daily 5: hard at work during our daily literacy stations.

Writing Workshop: I have enjoyed hearing stories about Thanksgiving, putting up Christmas decorations, Elf on the Shelf, playing with cousins, visiting grandparents, etc.  All of these are great topics for your child to write about.  Ask your child what they wrote about this week.  As mentioned above when reading, I am encouraging the kids to "tap it out" when they are trying to spell words in their stories that aren't word wall words.  We are trying to get away from saying "how do you spell....?" and instead think "I don't know how to spell it, but I can tap it out or sound it out to figure it out."  They helped me tap out words to write a sentence about when I made chili this week.  You can see their great spelling below!

Ask your child about their "Elf Adventure Journal."  This is an extra writing activity we are doing daily to document where Jack, our elf on the shelf, has been every day!  The kiddos will bring it home at winter break. 

Math: this week we sorted objects by size, color, shape and thickness, we played a shape guessing game with a "feely box" (ask your chid about this), explored calculators (they especially loved this!), collected data by taking a survey about favorite colors and continued to practice our teen numbers by singing the song I posted last week and playing a teen card game.  They are bringing this teen card game home today.  This is for you to keep at home and play as a family!

Science: during first trimester of school we focused on living and non-living during science.  We did this through nature walks, books, discussions and Mystery Science videos and activities.  During second trimester we will learn about the weather.  We already check and discuss the weather daily during calendar time, but will go more in depth during this next trimester.  

Winter holidays:  this month we will learn about several winter holidays, such as Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa.  Even though everyone in our class celebrates Christmas (which is why we have our elf on the shelf), we have many families in our school and community who celebrate other special holidays.  The children love learning about other special traditions that families have.  We will do this through read aloud books, short videos and crafts.  Everything we do will be very surface level, and more just to bring an awareness to the many special differences we have in our world that makes it a beautiful place to live!  
Today we read the silly book Who will guide my sleigh tonight? by: Jerry Pallotta and David Biedrzyxki and made reindeer to decorate our room.  We also learned we can watch Santa's real life reindeer at the North Pole via his reindeer security camera!  Check it out at home at www.reindeercam.com

Ugly Sweater Day: Oh my goodness,I love how many kiddos participated in this fun day today!  They looked great and so festive!!!  This may have been one of my favorite school days so far this year!  They were all so excited to show off their attire and see their friends and teachers attire!