Weekly News December 7-11

This is such an exciting and magical time of year for students, not only because of all of the holiday excitement, but because their learning is taking off in incredible ways and they are really starting to take ownership over all they know.  We hope you are witnessing this as your child does their nightly reading and completes activities from the homework calendar...they have so much to be proud of!

Upcoming Dates:
December 9: Protective Behaviors Presentation 9:00-9:45
December 10: Pajama Day at school and PJ's, Pizza and Publishing Family Night 5:30-7:00
December 15: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
December 23: Holiday Colors Day
December 24-January 3: Winter Break

Reading:  We will move towards wrapping up our 3rd reading unit at the end of this week.  During this last bend of the unit we will focus on using punctuation to figure out how to read and then match our voices to tell the story.  We will also push our partner conversations by learning our last reading super power: Book Talk Power!  While this unit will be finishing soon, we will rely on these super powers for the rest of the year.  We will have a big Super Hero Day celebration of our new found super powers on December 23rd.  Watch for more info to come home soon!

Writing:  We have been working with our reading partners during writing workshop to practice re-reading our true stories and to give each other tips and kind feedback about using sight words, vowels and neat writing.  It is so neat to observe how much the boys and girls are able to learn from one another.  This week we will use our partner to listen for more sounds in words we stretch out in our stories and will also be working to draw more vivid and telling pictures to accompany our writing.  We will extend and add to the writing we have completed by adding flaps to our writing in spots we realized we have missed details or want to say more...this will be so exciting and motivating for us!

Math: This week we will begin a new math unit.  The main focuses of this unit will be:
developing awareness of numbers 11-20 and recognizing these numbers as groups of 10 tens and extra ones.  As in all units we will continue deepen our understanding of addition and subtraction and showing expressions that match story problems as well as writing our own story problems to demonstrate our knowledge of addition and subtraction equations.
The math centers we will work in this week will be:

• going on a teen number hunt and recording teen numbers as a group of ten and extra
• using foam ten frames to construct teen numbers
• finding partners of numbers 1-10 and recording equations to show them
• using buttons to demonstrate subtraction equations

Science:  Feathers were VERY exciting last week.  We love all of the hands-on materials we get to use in our Einstein kits!  We learned that there are 3 different types of feathers: down, contour, and flight feathers.  We looked closely at feathers from different birds and learned how amel and female birds may have different feathers.  We compared birds bodies to airplanes and were surprised to find many similarities, and as you probably noticed, we built our own paper airplanes as well.  This week we will focus on reptiles and amphibians.

Word Work:  We will spend another week on the sight words: come, look, my, like, to.  We have also been learning out to create our own "snap" words (words we can read in a snap) as students come across words in their reading that they want to know in a snap.  Here are the 6 steps to follow: