1st Week Back

Ask Your Child About...

1. Identify the word 'with' in text around them

2. How they can use a picture to tell a story

3. To write and solve equations and read the number sentence

4. How we can sink wood and how we can change its shape

We LOVE the snow!

🎉 Our paw jar is full again! We will celebrate our great behavior on Monday with a pajama and stuffed animal day! Yes, that's right, this time the kid's can bring along one of their stuffed animals. Please help your child choose a stuffed friend that will easily fit in their backpack, next to them on the rug and at their table seats.

✨ Student Council has scheduled a school-wide twin day next Friday, December 7th! Help your child come up with something they can wear to match a friend or sibling for the day.

📗 In your child's Friday Folder you will find the December Scholastic Book Flyers for the month of December. There are tons of great options for beginning readers including picture books, leveled readers, and early chapter books. The order due date will be by the morning of Monday, December 10th. This early date ensures books ordered will be delivered by the 20th, which is just before our winter break! If you are wanting books to be a surprise/gift just let me know and we can figure out the best way to keep this wonderful surprise. 😊

📚 In reading this week we focused on drawing conclusions. We read various stories that taught us a lesson or showed us a feeling without actually telling us the main point. We then discussed how we gathered this idea using evidence from the text and illustrations to support our thinking. These kiddos sure are intuitive!

🖊 Pictures tell us all sorts of things, and they are a major part of the stories we read! For writing we are using a show and tell method: I show a picture to the class and the students tell the story as they imagine it. This is a great way to eliminate the stress of finding a topic to write about and focus more on the words we are writing. Show and tell writing is a simple and fun way to get your child writing at home! Show a picture (of family, animals, buildings, anything!) and have them draw it in their own way... adding details as they see fit for their story of the picture - then, write!

Our first Show and Tell picture story.

🔢 This week in math we have been working to write equations! We realized taking two separate groups and putting them together to find out how many is really addition in disguise! We can show this by writing an equation: ___ + ___ = ___! We then practice reading the equation by using our number sentence ___ plus ___ equals ___. You can do this at home with your child by gathering two groups of objects, counting how many and then writing the equation, solving it, and reading it aloud.

🌳 Science focused on two aspects this week: how to sink something that floats, and how we can alter the shape of wood. These were fun activities that can be extremely versatile. We used rubber bands and paperclips to sink two different types of wood, and then discussed why they might be different in how many paperclips they need to sink. You could try this at home and change the item you are sinking or the materials used to sink it! We then used sandpaper to create sawdust from a piece of wood. We discussed how this changes the wood in shape, size, and texture. You could do this at home with sticks and sandpaper. 

Fall Break 🦃

Ask Your Child About...

1. Identifying the words 'come' and 'my' in text around them

2. How they feel about writing now that they are published authors

3. Combining numbers of objects to see how many in all

4. How wood reacts to water

5. All of the fun fall activities and surprises they have had 🍂

6. Blankets coming home... washing time! 🙂

🦃 We have had a quick two weeks and are excited for our long weekend break! I hope you all are able to relax and enjoy some wonderful time with family and friends. I am beyond thankful for all of these kiddos and the hard work they put in each and every day, as well as everything you do as a family to support them. Thank you!

🍎 Thank you all for meeting at conferences! I am always available to talk anytime as needed, just let me know. 

🎉 Next week we will be back to our regular full schedule and on Friday the 30th, the student council has decided we will do a crazy sock day! 

🙂 I would like to ask for your help that we only bring items for show and tell on Mondays and/or Fridays. We have been bringing lots and lots of great things to share but it is becoming a little time consuming. If you could help your child decide on special things to share and limit them to Mondays and/or Fridays this would really help! Thank you!

📚 Reading these past two short weeks has helped us focus on comparing and contrasting stories and their characters. We looked within each of our stories for things that were the same and different for the characters and settings, as well as across different books of the same story (for example different Three Little Pigs stories). This helped us not only find similarities and differences, but it also helped us understand different character's point of view. This helps us while reading as well as in our own lives when we are trying to understand what someone around us might be thinking and feeling.

🖊 Next week we will start a new writing unit called Show and Tell. This unit consists of showing the students a scenario, then providing them with time to draw it, label their drawing, and work on a story to explain the scenario. I am very excited for this unit as it takes away the stress of thinking of something to write about and allows the student to focus on the words. This can easily be done at home by showing your child a picture (something silly or interesting to them) and allowing them to explain the story to you. They can then write out what they think is causing the picture to be the way it is. This week we focused on how much we have grown and even gave a quote about our writing just like real authors do for reporters!

✅ We have expanded our study of greater than, less than, or equal to by combining the groups. Now when we count objects in a group and compare them to another group we can put them all together to see how many in all! Wow! We are adding! We have been able to complete number sentences by saying ___ and ___ make/is ___. Next week we will be placing the addition symbol and equal sign into our number sentences. This will be a big step in our mathematical process!

🌳💧 We had a lot of fun exploring how wood reacts with water. We used two different types of wood for these experiments and compared their reactions. One type of wood was Particle Board and the other was Red Cedar. We started our investigation by discussing what we thought would happen to the wood and water, then we practiced using a dropper. We first tested just one drop of water on each side of the two types of wood. Then we compared how the two types of wood reacted when placed in a tub of water. We had a lot of fun experimenting with wood and water!

SNOW ❄

Ask Your Child About...

1. To identify and spell the word 'can' in text around you

2. Scrambled up sentences!

3. Sorting and comparing groups of objects

4. Balloon Rocket!

5. Kinder Tales field trip!

   
What a fantastic week! Conferences are off to a great start and we had our very first field trip! 😊

❄ It is feeling like fall and maybe even winter! We all noticed the change in weather this week as it was much chillier and windier at recess! We also had snow! Thank you for sending your child in the proper gear! Feel free to show them the handy hat and glove trick. 🙂 This consists of placing your mittens inside your hat and then inside your coat sleeve. This prevents us from losing them or mixing them up with other classmates' things! Another helpful tool is to write your child's name on each and every piece of weather clothing. Many of our things are similar and hard to tell apart. We also get so excited about the snow that we tend to misplace things. Having your child's name on everything will ensure it gets back to them quickly. Thank you!
❄ For reference, students are only allowed to play in the snow if they have snow boots and pants along with their winter coat, hat, and gloves. Otherwise they will be confined to the blacktop.

🎉 On Wednesdays the Student Council will bring around the school store on a cart. This is a fun way to raise money for Lincoln student council. The store consists of pencils, gel pens, erasers, highlighters, mini notebooks, and other small school supply items. These items vary in price from a quarter to one dollar. This is completely optional and only available on Wednesday mornings.

🍎 Next Friday the 16th, there will be no school due to conferences.

📚 In reading we focused on summarizing our stories! We discovered how to find the important details and and rephrase the story so it short but showing the overall idea. The students are getting really good at this! 👍 We also focused on the word 'can'. This is a word we have been seeing a lot in our reading so we are excited to be able to spell and remember it for our own stories!

🖊 We are currently between writing units which allows us some time to practice penmanship and sentence structure. We have been working with scrambled sentences to help us identify the beginning, middle, and end of a sentence. We then work to rewrite it in our very best handwriting. You can do this with your child at home by creating short simple sentences for them to work through. Simply write out the sentence, cut it apart, and then help your child read the words and put them in the correct order. They can then rewrite the sentence on a new sheet and even add their own illustrations!

🔢 In math we have been doing a little review of sorting and comparing groups of objects. This is something your child has most likely seen before this year and is being reviewed to ensure they have a solid foundation. We look at images and work with objects to create different types of groups and then compare how many. For example, we might look at a picture of some animals outside. We would then classify our animals into two different groups such as animals with wings and animals not with wings. We then count the number of animals in each group and write the number down. Then we identify the group that has the greater, least, or equal amount. This is easy to do at home or while you are out and about!

🎈 We continued our study of pushes and pulls in science by experimenting with balloon rockets! This was a very fun and easy activity that you could also set up at home! This experiment helped us see how a balloon can move and how air can be a force. We talked about how we can change the way the balloon moves by adding more air, taking away air, or blocking the path with different objects. Next week we will return to our study of wood!

Happy Halloween! 🎃

      

Ask Your Child About...

1. Author's Celebration
2. Adding one to a group

3. Finding slopes around us

    

    

What a wonderful Halloween Week! Thank you to all of the parents who came out to help and support our class and school! We love having our families come see us! 😊 Next Thursday, November 8th will be the field trip to Kinder Tales! Again, thank you for getting the permission slips back so quickly and for those who have volunteered to hep us! 😊 

In your child's Friday Folder you will find some information about the book fair. I am also sending home our November Scholastic order and will ask for all orders to be placed by November 16th. Thank you in advance for showing interest in our kiddos reading! 📗

🎉 Next Friday the 9th will be a school-wide pajama day! We loved wearing our pajamas to school for our paw jar celebration and are excited to wear them again with the entire school! We will also have an extra recess Monday as a celebration for filling our paw jar again! Way to go lions!! 🦁

📚 Reading this week brought our attention to text and graphic features! We learned how these extra pictures and labels can help us better understand what we are reading. This tied right into our writing as we are working to add details that help our readers understand what we are writing about.

🖊 Beyond adding details to our writing we focused on making a writing piece complete. We looked at some examples of our favorite books to think of some things writers do before they publish their books. We decided that writers took a careful look at their words to make sure they can understand them, they add any last details to their pictures and label things that may need identifying, add extra lined pages for pages that require more writing, and meet with a fellow author to double check. When we were done with our checking process, we had a celebration! Each author read their favorite true story to the class and their big buddies! We also had a toast (... no, not the kind you put butter on 😅) to our great work as official authors of teaching books and true stories.

✅ In math, we finished up our work with comparing groups of objects and moved on to adding one more. We realized we don't need to go back and count all the objects again! No way! We can just count on! For example, if we count a group of 5 and add one more, we don't need to go back and count all the pieces again with the new piece! No way! We can say "5 and one more makes 6!" You can help your child by counting on at home or while at the store. Counting objects in a book and asking what is one more or one less.

🏀 Science brought us outside to find ramps all around us! We experimented with different types of ball, changing the size, weight, and color. Our scientists were very excited to try out different balls on the ramps we found on and around the playground! We found that the heavier the ball, the faster it went! The steeper the slope, the fast it went! If our slope has holes, it is not a very good slope, and color doesn't matter! WOW! What great investigators!

Slope Science Experts!