February 17, 2012 Update...

Hi Parents,

We have had a really good week, putting much of our emphasis on the concept of nonfiction.  If your child complained of a cramped hand, that might be my fault!  Reading and writing go hand-in-hand and I have really been pushing the kids this week to create informational papers that teach their audience something, while at the same time using juicy words and exciting hooks and closings.  We ended our week on a fun note today, learning all about eating right and exercising as we watched a Kaiser Permanente puppet show called "Give Peas a Chance".  Check out below to find out what else we have been doing this week...

Phonics:  We learned about the two sounds of the letter c.  We learned the rules that if a, o or u follow the c, the sound will be  hard like a k and if a e, i, or y follows the c, the sound will be soft.  We worked on our white boards to practice sounding out words, we created word webs, and we played a game on the smartboard.

Reading:  This week, we focused on learning how context clues help us figure out unfamiliar words.  We read several nonfiction books and looked for ways to figure out these words.  We then played a game, trying to figure out what a nonsense word might mean by looking at the rest of the sentence. The kids had so much fun making up their own nonsense words on sentence strips and trying to see if the class could guess the meaning of the word!  We also read a passage about George Washington Carver and answered questions about the passage.

Writing:  We researched George Washington Carver and then created an idea web to help us organize our thoughts before writing.  We then used this web to write wonderful informational papers about this American hero.  We really like writing on our peanut paper!  Later in the week, we researched information about parts of plants and began organizing our idea web.  We will be making a "Parts of a Plant" book that you will see coming home next week.

Math:  We finished up our unit on making fair change.  We have moved on to interpreting data from graphs.  We will be on this topic through next week.  We also revisited the skill of representing numbers in many ways (standard form, written form, using base tens and ones, and expanded form) and played a game with a partner. 

Science/Social Studies:  We completed our unit on George Washington Carver and began our unit on Plants.  We read several books about the important parts of the plant and the functions of those parts.  We worked with our book buddies to label and explain each part and we read several reading passages on the smart board.

Classroom News and Announcements...

Make sure you are keeping your child's reading log updated!  I am using these forms to verify that your child has read enough to qualify for the Six Flags Reading Program.  I am collecting all reading logs (and have been as your child fills them up) next week, Feb. 22. 

You will find a field trip permission slip and money envelope in your child's folder next Wednesday. We are so excited about our upcoming trips. Please return your $$ and signed permission slip ASAP. 

No school on Monday!  Yeah!

Congratulations to Cameron Waters for being chosen as our Teacher's Helper this week!  Way to go!

Thank you to Mrs. Abrams for coordinating all the special activities this week for Teacher Appreciation Week! Loved it!!!