Sunday, September 25, 2016

Newsletter Updates for the Week of September 26th

DATES TO REMEMBER:
-Friday, Sept. 30th—Progress Reports Home
-Tuesday, Oct. 11th—Title 1 Family Night
-Monday, Oct. 17th—Delayed Start

STUDENT OF THE WEEK: 
Our student of the week is Grace Wilson. Grace loves her three cats and she’s really good at jumping on the bed.  She likes to eat tacos, ice cream, cookies, & corn dogs and her favorite movie is Avengers.  She has traveled to 19 states and this year she aspires to pass the deep water swim test at the YMCA and learn to read! Congratulations to Grace on being our Student of the Week!

COINS FOR KIDS:  
We are partnering with Pizza Hut and collecting coins for the ‘Coins for Kids’ project.  You can participate by sending in spare change to add to our classroom bucket:)

ASSESSMENTS:  
We are currently in the process of doing our beginning of the year benchmarking assessments. Last week the students were given the Aimsweb for Math and this week they will be doing DIBELS for Reading. This week and next week we will also be going to the computer lab to complete our NWEA testing for Reading & Math. It seems like a lot for these little ones, I know, but we will ‘learn’ the process together and the only way to measure growth is to have a starting point:)  I will share all of this assessment data with you in  November @ parent teacher conferences.

READING:
We’ve quickly made it through introducing ALL of the letters of the alphabet and now we will slow our pace a bit and focus on one letter each week. This week our reading lessons will focus on the letter Mm and we will introduce a new sightword—the. Our focus story for the week is What About Bear? which we will use to practice building our listening and comprehension skills. This week we will introduce 2 new beanie baby strategies: Questioning Owl who reminds us to stop and ask ourselves questions about the story while we are reading and Spinner Spider who helps us remember to ‘make connections’ as we read. At the end of this week, students will receive new materials in their book boxes that they can read during Read to Self time, which means that they will be bringing home their books that you provided at the beginning of the year. This is our first, of many, reading milestones that we will reach this year!

WRITING: 
We will begin learning about ‘small moment’ stories this week. The students will wrap up their September journals and they will be bringing them home to share with you next week. We will also work together to make a class book about living and non-living things.

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES:  
This week we will wrap up our Science Unit on Living and Non-Living things. Last week we learned that living things grow and change. This week we will learn about what living things ‘need’ in order to live & grow.  We will also continue reading and talking about all of the changes that occur in Fall.  On Friday, we will have a special visit from Scrappy the Squirrel who will tell us what he’s up to this time of year AND we will conduct a fun experiment with  acorns.

MATH:
We will practice describing and comparing shapes, as we focus on triangles. We will also play several games with dot cards as we practice identifying and matching different quantities of dots, as well as comparing which card has more and which card has less dots.

Items Needed—Please Send In—Gallon Milk Jugs
(empty and rinsed out) for us to use for an art project next week:)




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