December 4, 2015
Reading
We continue to play games and do activities that help us identify and spell all 40
of our sight words. The children are reading their decodable books
independently and reading in small groups with me. We do word work to help
them manipulate sounds and they listen to books being read on CD. I started
writing them a letter each morning to model letter writing (a very dead art
indeed! ) We use the letter to find sight words, to count sentences, and many
other things. The children love the letters and get excited to see what I have
written! We are working on adjectives, nouns, and verbs. We are practicing
reading with expression and to develop fluency.
Writing
The children and I are doing some guided writing. We are writing a picture
together and discussing all the steps to writing independently. I am reminding
them to start a sentence with an upper case letter, to end with punctuation, to
put spaces between their words, and to use their writer’s notebooks to help
them with sound, sight words, and other useful words for writing. We discuss that
drawing the picture is the best place to start so that they can think about the
story they want to write as they draw. The children are doing very well with
writing and we will continue to write every day!
Math
We are working on decomposing numbers with the base ten system. We
learned that numbers are made up of tens and ones, hundreds and thousands.
We are working with tens and ones. For example the number 57 has 5 tens and 7
ones. We are working with simple addition and subtraction and doing word
problems!
Social Studies/Science
We just completed our unit entitled pebbles, sand, and silt. We discovered that
a person who studies rocks is called a geologist. We learned about volcanic
rocks and river rocks. We separated our river rocks by using screens. We
discovered that the biggest rocks we looked at are called pebbles, then gravel
is smaller, then sand, then silt. Clay is the smallest of all the rocks and people use
clay to make jewelry, and pottery, and even plates!
Reminders/Announcements

The first report card period ends on Monday, December 7th, 2015
and report cards will be sent home on Friday, December 11th.
Please sign the envelope and return ONLY the envelope on
Monday, December 14th.

Friday, December 11th will be the class holiday party for the children
only. No outside food will be permitted of any kind. Thank you!

Holiday Express will be on Tuesday, December 22nd. Children may
wear their pajamas but NO Slippers please! Thanks!