Weekly News Jan. 25-29

We had a fun week celebrating our school last week!  This week we will celebrate more student accomplishments as report cards will be sent home.  Please be sure to check your child's folder for his/ her report card today.  As always, if you have question or concerns, please feel free to contact us! 

Important Dates:
Jan. 29th:  NDLC/Quinney Dance-5:30 pm
Feb. 8th: 100 day of school celebration (more info to come)
Feb. 9th: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
Feb. 12th: Valentine's Day Celebration
Feb. 25th: 1/2 day 11:30 dismissal
Feb. 26th: NO SCHOOL
Feb. 29th: Family Night

Our Valentine's Day celebration will be on Friday, February 12th.  Here is a class list if you are feeling really ambitious and want your child to work on writing cards soon!  We will send a paper copy home with your child in the near future.

Reading: We are studying our sight words closely this week as we notice that often words that look tricky might actually just be sight words with additional letters on their endings.  Later this week we will wrap up the unit by powering up our reread power to bring books to life and our book talk power to retell, share new information, and have powerful partner conversations.  We will celebrate all of our hard work in this unit as we wrap it up on Friday with a little graduation into new and tricker books!

Writing: This week we will continue to focus on ways to improve upon and elaborate in our how to writing.  We will work or include introductions and conclusions in our books and will also be using comparisons in our books to add more specifics to directions we give in our writing.  We will also use parts of our school day and procedures we take part in daily to generate new writing ideas and to create collections of books on the same or similar topics.   We will wrap up the week by using an editing checklist to remind us of ways we know to make our writing easy to read.

Math: This week we will continue to extend our understanding of teen numbers, sorting and story problems.  We will be introduced to new tools called centimeter cubes and ten sticks that will provide us with another way to show and see a group of ten in teen numbers.  We will also focus on finding partners of a given number by playing a game with a partner.  Our math centers this week will be:

• playing teen number and equation memory
• playing chip toss to see partners of a number
• creating and solving math stories using the quantities shown on dominoes
• following directions to build a teen number using unifix cubes and comparing what we have built

Social Studies: Students will get a chance to work in small groups to explore the centers we learned about last week.  They will take turns acting out different family scenarios from pictures, interviewing and reporting their findings about a classmate's family, and writing their own books about their families.

Word Work:  As mentioned, in reader's workshop this week we are talking a bit about sight words wearing "disguises" or having additional letters on the endings.  Example:  play: playing, plays, played.  You can hunt for this disguised sight words as you are reading together at home or on environmental print from signs and billboards on the road!