Week 4

Thank you to the parent who came to Curriculum night on Tuesday, and for the wonderful birthday presents. The kids really made me feel special!

We have a few classroom needs, please e-mail me if you can donate any of these items:

• 3-4 Paper towel rolls (the school provided ones just don't clean up spills easily
• Foam Soap (3-4 containers.. we seem to go through a lot of soap, which keeps us healthy!)
• One box of Paper Mate Black Flair  felt tip pens (12 count)

 

 

 

Here is a peak at what we will be focusing on this week:

Language Arts 

 

 

• Letter Sounds and phonemic awareness: d, f, h, g
• Sight Words: I, a, am
• Reading books left to right, top to bottom, and one page at a time, sentence features

Handwriting: lowercase v, w, t, words with t, a

• We will be continue to build our “reading stamina” during Read to Self. Our goal is to be able to keep our reading stamina for 20 minutes. Currently we have made it to 13 minutes. Students are to – Read the whole time, stay in one spot, be quiet, and eyes on their books. You may have your child practice building their “read to self” stamina at home.

Writing 

• Students will make a “heart map”. In their heart map, they will illustrate and write things that are important to them. It may be people that make them happy, a vacation that they really enjoyed, something they are scared of, a favorite food or character, etc. Students will add to their heart map throughout the year whenever something happens to them that they care about. The heart map will stay at the beginning of the writing journal for students to refer to for writing topics during Writers Workshop.
• We will compose an “I am an expert….” Chart. Students may add these topics they come up with to their heart map. This think aloud is designed to help students how to think about topics to write about.
• Students will begin building their writing stamina in Writers Workshop. This stamina is similar to reading stamina during Read to Self.
• Students will learn how to stretch out words and write the sounds you hear when trying to write words.
• Students will learn what to do when they are done with their writing. We say, “When you’re done, you’ve just begun”. Students can add more detail to their drawing or more words to their story.

 

Math

Students will be introduced to patterns through multisensory experimental activities. Students will be introduced to simple color patterns. Students will be introduced to attributes and sorting. Students will practice sorting coins and begin coin recognition. Students will develop number sense and counting.

IB-Who We Are 

We will be discussing the central idea of the first IB Unit “Who We Are”. The central idea is “Feelings, cultures, and interests shape humans identities”.

• We will begin presenting our "Me" dolls as they are turned in
• We will discuss and graph birthdays.
• We will discuss and graph eye color.
• We will read Chysanthumum and graph how many letters are in our names.

Science

Students will be learning about the 5 senses: touch, taste, hear, sight, smell. Students will be introduced to theses senses and experiment with the senses in a variety of ways. On the “taste” day, students will be tasting foods from each taste category: sweet, sour, bitter, salty. If you would not like your students to taste foods, please email me and let me know. If you would like to donate these foods to taste, we need enough for 26 kids to have one of each of the following:

-       Sour patch kids

-       Pretzels

-       Lemon slices

-       M&m’s

Please email me to let me know what you can provide for our taste experiment. After our experiment, we will graph our favorite taste.  

 

Please continue to work on the red sight words with your child at home.

 

Remember, library day is Tuesday. Please have your child bring their library book back to school Tuesday morning.

 

 

The poetry folder will be going home today. Have your child sing the color poems over the weekend and return the folder on Monday morning.