Newsletter Updates for the Week of November 28th

DATES TO REMEMBER:
-Friday, Dec. 9th—Next visit to the Library
-Monday, Dec. 12th—Delayed Start
-Tuesday, Dec. 20th—Christmas Party

THANKSGIVING/STONE SOUP:
Thanks for sending in food and supplies last week to make our Stone Soup Feast a success! Special thanks to all of the parent and grandparent volunteers who also came in to lend a hand! I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving Break with your families!

BOOK IT:
Please remember to return you child’s November Book-It Calendar so that I can award pizza certificates. I’m attaching a December calendar if you’d like to participate in Book-It for December.

STUDENT RELEASE FORM:
Attached you will find a yellow student release form. Please read it over carefully, complete it, and return it to school as soon as possible.

READING:
This week we will be working on the letter Tt as well as the sightwords am & like. We will be reading a few books about Trains to correlate with the letter T and we will also be reading Dinner at the Panda Palace as we work on predicting, comprehension, and vocabulary. We will be introducing a new Beanie Baby Comprehension Strategy this week: Questioning Owl. Questioning Owl reminds us to stop and ask questions while we read to help us understand what we are reading. We also have a full week of literacy stations; students will be busy sequencing and retelling stories, working on recognizing color words, rhyming, and sightwords, as well as handwriting grocery lists. During strategy groups, students will be working on sightwords, reading leveled readers, and segmenting words into individual sounds.

WRITING:
This week we will use the text The Relatives Came for a couple of mini-lessons on Word Choice and Organization. We will complete a couple of journal entries related to families: relatives we like to visit and how we help our families. On Thursday, we will complete a Type 3 Writing as we draw and write about the people who live in our house. On Friday, we will introduce Voice as we read Sometimes I Feel Like a Mouse and students will complete a ‘free choice’ journal entry expressing Voice through their writing and drawings.

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES:
This week we will begin our Social Studies Unit on Families. We will be reading several books about Families and practice using our Comprehension Strategies: Spinner Spider, Picturing Penguin, & Questioning Owl. Our focus text will be My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks: And Other Funny Family Portraits by Hanoch Piven.

MATH:
This week we will begin learning about money as we introduce the penny and practice identifying and counting pennies. We will also continue to work on identifying and writing the numbers 1-20 and counting orally 1-50. The students will be finishing up their ‘Countdown to Christmas’ chain so that they can bring it home on Wednesday.