Newsletter - Week of September 11th

DATES TO REMEMBER:

-Tuesday, September 12th—K-2 Picture Day

-Monday, September 18th—Delayed Start (10:00)

-Friday, September 29th—Progress Reports Home

PICTURE DAY: 

Our picture day is tomorrow—Tuesday, September 12th. ALL students will be photographed for the yearbook and library cards. If you’d like to purchase pictures, please be sure to send in your payment and completed envelope by Tuesday morning. Don’t forget your SMILE!

TESTING:

We will be completing our beginning of the year screeners and assessments over the next couple of weeks. We will visit the computer lab to take the NWEA Map Assessment—a computer-based assessment for both Math & Reading. We will also be completing DIBELS testing and a Number Words and Numerals Assessment one-on-one with the students. This will allow us to identify students who might need some extra supports at home and school. I’ll be sharing their results with you so that you can be an active part of your child’s success!

READING:

This week our reading lessons will focus on the letters I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q & R. We will also introduce the sightword—can.  We will continue to work on recognizing, naming, and writing our letters during literacy stations. The students have learned a couple of fun learning apps on their ipads and are enjoying starfall.com on the computer each day. They are also doing a nice job of reading from their book boxes during ‘read-to-self’ time after lunch. This week we will introduce Eagle Eye who reminds us to look at the pictures for clues to figure out the words while we are reading.

WRITING:

We will continue our unit on Speaking & Listening as we talk about ‘things we know and can do.’ We will also learn about questions words and practice using them—who, what, when, where, why, & how, as well as prepositional phrases (positional words) - on, under, between, over, etc. We will complete a couple of journal pages about butterflies and our families, as we practice adding colors and details.

MATH:

We will be learning how to identify and write the numbers 2, 3, 4, & 5. We will also practice counting items using one-to-one correspondence and work on building numbers using different manipulatives. We will create and interpret data with graphs this week; we will graph our birthdays and our ages.

SCIENCE & SOCIAL STUDIES:

This week we will release our butterflies so that they can migrate to Mexico—the students have been so excited to watch this process! We will continue our study of Living Things as we learn the 7 Traits of Living Things—eat, move, breathe, sense, reproduce, excrete, & grow. We will also begin learning about the things that living things NEED in order to live—air, water, food, space, & shelter. In Social Studies we will wrap up our Unit on School Rules by learning some fair ways to make decisions in a group. We will also read  the book: Have You Filled a Bucket Today? which has a wonderful message about spreading kindness to others.

THANK YOU: 

I just wanted to say a big ‘Thank You’ to all of you for being so generous in providing supplies for our classroom. It is great to have the cupboards stocked and ready for a great year of learning and fun! Thanks so much!