Exciting Times in Room 33! 🐟

Ask Your Child About...

1. Identify the words all and she in various texts

2. Count from any number to another within 100

3. Find patterns between numbers up to 100

4. Our goldfish!

5. Talk about what you need to properly care for a pet

6. Write, Tell, or Read how-to books

🎶 Today we were able to enjoy an orchestra concert from South East Junior High. The kids loved listening to the different genres of music they played and were very excited to see the different sizes/sounds of each instrument!

✨Student council has announced that we will be collecting Box Tops through April 18th. Please keep an eye out for any of these, clip them out, and send them to school for our big jar collection. We are aiming for 2,000 Box Tops! They also announced that next Friday, April 5 will be stripe day. If your child would like to participate in this school-wide spirit day all they need to do is wear stripes to school!

🍎SNACK. We are on our last boxes of graham crackers and will be needing more snack by the end of next week. If you are able, please pick out a healthy snack option for the class and send it to school with your child. Options can include, but are not limited to: graham crackers, pretzels, little oranges, apples, veggie straws, goldfish, animal crackers, Nutrigrain bars, and so on. Thank you!

📚 This week in reading we focused on sequence of events and visualizing where the story would go next. This is a great skill to practice at home by reading through a story followed by a retelling verbally or physically acting it out together. Another great way to accomplish this skill is to write down events that took place in the story on separate sheets of paper, mixing them up, and then sorting them back out to tell the real story. Challenge your child by setting out the story in a mixed up order and asking them to correct it!

🖊 Reading this week really helped us connect to our writing as we are now working on How-To writings. These are very fun books to write and correct! Ask your child about when Ms. Grady learned to put on a coat or to make scrambled eggs! Oh MY! How-To stories take a lot of visualizing and sequencing of events. The kiddos have truly enjoyed this unit so far, and I encourage you to keep the joy going at home by writing more How-To books outside of school- then act them out! Remember: How-To books need three things. 1. tell what to do in steps 2. number the steps 3. have a picture for each step. 

🔢 In math we have been working on finding patterns between numbers from 0 to 100. The students are quick to see how we can use a hundreds chart to count by 2's, 5's, 10's and so on- keep the work up at home! This also leads us to looking at how to move from one number to the next easily and quickly. This part can be tricky as we typically want to count on (continue counting from the number we are at until we get to the desired end number). However, we want to encourage the students to look past counting single digits to get to far away numbers and rather encourage them to use what they know about place value. 

For example: If you show your child a 100's chart and ask them to find 42. Hopefully they will use some of the patterns they know to skip count by tens (moving straight down the chart) from 0 to get to 40 and then add two more (moving horizontally across the chart) to get to 42. Or maybe they will recognize that 42 is 40 greater than 2, so they can find the number 2 and count by tens (moving vertically down the chart) until they arrive at 42.

Further example: Now that you are at 42, ask your child what number would be 21 away (or 21 bigger). Many students are currently counting out twenty-one steps from forty-two to find the answer. Instead, we want to help them see how they can use groups of tens and ones to count on. This would mean that your child would start at 42 and recognize that 21 is made up of two groups of ten and one more. They would then start at 42, count by tens (moving vertically down the chart) until they have moved 20 away and then count across the chart to get the one more.

🐟 Life Science has arrived! We currently have goldfish and guppies in our classroom for observation and the kiddos could not be more excited! We will study the structure of the fish so that we are able to name each part, identify the things a fish needs to survive, and discover what happens when we add different things to their tank (such as food, fresh water, plants, and structures). Continue this talk about living things and their needs at home by discussing and observing people, animals, and plants!

Ms. Stephanie sneakily took a picture of our first observations! 😊

  

       

We have two tanks for our fish. One for our goldfish, which we named Nemo (orange and white), Lava (orange), and Steele Panther (silver)- how great are these names?! 😅😃 The second tank holds our guppies, which we did not name as they are difficult to tell apart, but rather we each have our own nick name for them when we talk to them. Our guppies currently consist of one male (has a black dot and is smaller), four female, and two teeny tiny babies.

🌞 What a wonderful week it has been! I hope you all are enjoying this spring weather and have a wonderful weekend! As always, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns please don't hesitate to ask!