Welcome Back to a Fabulous New Year!

READING CHALLENGE: Our class is getting closer to our 60 hours of reading at home! We are at 38 hours of reading!  Please help your child by practicing reading at home.  For every 15 minutes of reading your child can color in a penguin!  Please send the sheet to school when your child has 4 penguins colored in.  Here is the sheet you can print.  I will be sending new sheets home next week.  You can also make your own if you don’t have a print. A note from you saying they read at home also works! 

Important Dates:

Early Release Day:  Wednesday January 11th.  

Staff Inservice Day:  (no school for students) Monday January 16th

Snowmotion:  Snowmotion is fast approaching.  Our ski dates include Wednesday Jan. 25, Wednesday Feb. 1, Wednesday Feb. 15, and Wednesday Feb. 22!

Extra Clothing:  If you haven’t already done so, please make sure there is an extra set of clothing in your child’s backpack incase of emergencies or a wet/muddy playground.  Socks and extra pants are especially helpful.  

 Learning highlights from the week:

 Math- Some First grade students have finished up unit 3 and will begin their next unit next week.The focus of this unit will be measurement and fractions.   Second graders have been working on word problems with an unknown start.  These types of problems can be very tricky.  For instance: Sally bought cat stickers.  She gave 13 to a friend and kept 32 for herself.  How many cat stickers did Sally Buy?  Students see the words gave to a friend and assume it will be a subtraction problem.  Drawing a sketch for these types of problems helps students to visualize the problem and make sense of it.  

 Reading- We have begun our unit on nonfiction reading.  We have talked about taking a sneak peek into a book to activate prior knowledge and how we learn new things when reading nonfiction. Some groups are working on beginning and ending blends; others are working on long vowel teams.  

Writing-  Students have also begun a nonfiction unit in writing.  They will be writing “teaching books”, and learning about all the features of a nonfiction piece including subtopics, headings, captions, bold print and tables of contents.