October 20,2017

Greetings everyone! We've been so busy in Room E111, learning and having fun! The students are growing by leaps and bounds each week---it's so amazing to watch! Here's what we've been up to the past few weeks!

ELA

Students have been working on Sequence, Character, and Classifying information into categories while reading the books Julius, Miss Bindergarten Takes a Field Trip With Kindergarten, and Dig, Dig, Digging. When you are reading at home with your child, remember to ask your child if he/she can name the characters from the story and if he/she can retell you the sequence of the story. This will help to build your child's reading comprehension!
We also added the following words to our word wall: my, to, like, and is. While we continue to practice letter sound recognition of ALL letters each day, we focused primarily on the letter sound /t/ and /m/ the past two weeks. See how many words beginning with /t/ and /m/ your child can name.
In Writing, students helped to create an anchor chart listing our "favorites"---we listed favorite people, favorite places, and favorite things. This anchor chart will be something we refer to throughout the year, when children need writing ideas.

MATH

Last week we finished Unit 1 of our CCRSM Math Modules, and we are now all "experts" on numbers from 0-10. Students should now be able to identify numbers 0-10, write number 0-10, count up to 10 objects, and model numbers 0-10 using manipulatives. Students also can now decompose numbers to 5 in more than 1 way (example: 5 is 2 and 3, 5 is also 1 and 4) Give your child a number, and see how many ways he/she can decompose it. Our next unit in Math, Unit 2, deals with classifying, identifying, and describing shapes and objects. We began this unit this week, and the students are already picking up on so many new vocabulary words. See if you child can tell you what "vertices" are---ask them why a square is a special kind of rectangle---and have them show you the different between curved lines and straight lines.

SCIENCE

In preparation for our Study Trip to Garner Farms, students spent the past few weeks exploring the Life Cycle of a Pumpkin. Students were quite amazed to note the similarities between the Apple Life Cycle and the Pumpkin Life Cycle. We charted these similarities (and differences) as a class using a Venn Diagram. Students used illustrations to show the Pumpkin Life cycle and will be adding these illustrations to a Pumpkin Life Cycle book next week!

STUDY TRIP

Speaking of Pumpkins---students had a FABULOUS time this week during our Study Trip to Garner's Farm. Students went in a corn pit, walked through a corn maze, got to pet a baby goat, went on a hayride to see pumpkin and sweet potato plants, watched a giant pumpkin catapult, raced through a hay maze, went down a GIANT tunnel slide, and got to pick their very own pumpkin to take home! Enjoy the pictures of our trip---I would have taken more, but I was having just as much fun as the kids, and had a hard time remembering to take out my camera! Thank you to all of the parents who joined us on our special day!!