Weekly News February 15th-19th

Things will return mostly to normal this week after a fun-filled last week!  We have our field trip to the Paper Discovery Center on Wednesday.  Please remember to send a cold lunch with your child if you did not order a bag lunch from school when you returned the permission slip.  

Upcoming Dates:
February 17th: Field Trip Permissions slips due back Feb. 12th!
February 25th: 1/2 day 11:30 Dismissal
                       PSC Family Night at Funset Boulevard 4-10pm
February 26th: NO SCHOOL
February 29th: Music and Masterpieces Family Night

Reading:  This week we will continue to focus on calling on the many, many strategies we know to help us as we read.  As you may have noticed from the weekly updates, this really is the meat of this unit--putting together and using all we know.  We will warm up for reading by rereading all the charts in our classroom to remind ourselves of the things we know and also build our partner conversations to help coach each other when we are stuck.  A new strategy that we will learn is that sometimes even after your very best try, you are still stuck and need to just move on (seems like this could be good life advice too!).  We can mark these tricky places with a post-it to come back to later by ourselves or with our partner.

Writing:  We will continue exploring the power of persuasion to help change things we can think can be made better in our world. We 1.) See a problem in our classroom, school, neighborhood, or world, 2.) Think!, 3.) Write a lot!  We are doing that through writing and making signs, letters, books, songs, posters, lists, and even petitions.  We have used the words of Dr. Seuss's Lorax, "Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better, it's not," to inspire us to show we care a whole awful lot. 

Math: We finished and took our assessment of Unit 3.  We have now begun Unit 4 which focuses on

• seeing the ten in teen numbers (10+3=13)
• knowing all the partners of 10 (1+9=10, 2+8=10, etc...)
• knowing all the partners of the numbers below 10.

Our math centers this week will be:

• 10 frames and cards/showing partners of 10
• equations with grocery store items
• teen number board and paint with q-tips
• unknown partners game

Science:  We LOVE, LOVE, LOVE this science unit!  Every day is packed full of hands-on expieriments, the products of which have now made their way into your home: sandpaper and wood, "sandwhich" or plywood, and sawdust or particle board.  We transferred our how-to writing skills to write a short "how-to make particle board" for the rest of our school.  Our focus will shift from wood to paper this week!  We will wrap up this unit at the beginning of March by making our own wood and paper sculptures.  If you have any wood and/or paper scraps that you would like to donate for this project, please send them to school with your child.  Of course, paper scraps could include boxes, cardboard, paper towel/toliet paper rolls, etc.  

Word Work:  Our new sight words for the next two weeks are: jump, funny, go, find, not.  We have also been working on word families in our classroom.  One way to practice this work at home is to play simple rhyming games.  Have your child pick a word and then take turns coming up with as many rhymes you can think of--and determine if they are real words or made up words.