Friday, December 13, 2019

Winter Cheer ⛄

Ask Your Child About...
1. Identify and write: you, what, me, come, with, are, my, now
2. Identify, sound, and write: Aa, Bb, Ff, Nn
3. Create subtraction equations
4. Our first material: wood!
We loved exploring frost on leaves and the frozen prints left underneath!
💗 Today was our last day with Ms. W. We will surely miss her, but we have learned a lot with her help and wish her all the best in becoming a teacher! Ask your child their favorite thing about Ms. W or a memory they have of all the reading work they did with her.

🙂 Student council has created a fun-filled week for us next week. To bring extra cheer and school spirit to Lincoln before break we will have a special  event each day!
Monday: Pajama and stuffed animal day
Tuesday: Color Day (we are red) and Candle Light Lunch 
Wednesday: Wacky (crazy sock and/or hair)
Thursday: Throwback (pick a decade to dress as)
Friday: Change your name day


💗 We will also be collecting donations for Ronald McDonald House! We have a special place in our room to set these items if you would like to send something with your student. Each grade level has a goal of reaching 20 donations and will decide on a special celebration if it is reached! If you would like to donate, we would love to have any of the following items: 
Tide or All Free and Clear Laundry detergent and dryer sheets
Swiffer Wet Jet refills: pads and solution
Leather wipes, multi-surface Pledge
Plastic utensils
First class postage stamps
Clorox wipes, diapers, paper bowls and plates

🦁 A note from a first grade parent who has been kind to lead a project for our Lincoln stairway: We are looking for positive sayings/quotes that can fit on the stairs. The letters need 2-2.5" each with spaces between words needing the same so I think we can fit roughly 30 spaces per stair. So sayings would have a total of 30 spaces... letters and spaces between the words. I would suggest 5 sayings per class ranked in popularity in case we get redundant sayings from various classes.
Please let me know if you and/or your kiddo come up with any short sayings that would fit in the 30 spaces per stair for our class to offer as an option. Thank you for your help with this project!

📚 This week in reading we have been focusing on sequence of events. We have read various stories and then worked to put them back in order. This included talking through the story, rearranging pictures, and asking for small bits of acting to help us remember what came next!

🔢 We have continued our study of subtraction starting again with counting groups and separating them, moving towards writing full equations, and ending the week with identifying subtraction within a story problem and creating a picture diagram as well as a number sentence and an equation.

   

🌳 As we discovered last week, we have started a new science unit of Materials and Motion- starting first with wood. This week we explored wood through our five senses and careful observation. We discovered different types of wood, what types of trees they come from, and why they might look, feel and smell differently. We then explored what happens when our wood gets wet! We experimented with drops of water and a full tub of water! Ask your scientist what happens when wood gets wet! We ended the week by testing our wood with a few other tools: rubber bands and paper clips. We turned our wood piece into a raft and tested how many paperclips it took to sink our raft! We then discovered half of our class had much different results... we investigated and found out we used two different pieces of wood! Then, as scientists do, we questioned and considered why our results would be different for our two types of wood. Keep the exploration going at home by discovering wooden objects in your home or testing various items with water.

Friday, December 6, 2019

December ❄

Ask Your Child About...
1. Identify and write: are, now
2. Identify, sound, and write: Bb
3. Take apart groups to create equations
4. Materials and Motion!

      

🦃 I hope you all had a wonderful fall break! We enjoyed talking about what we did and all the people we were able to spend time with. We are very thankful for our family and friends!

🚌 Our field trip to the Iowa City Children's Museum today was wonderful! The students loved touring each of the areas in the museum and discovering how we can turn our imagination and play into a story. We read The Idea Jar by Adam Lehrhaupt and would love to hear it again if you check it out at the library or find a read aloud online. Extra special shout out to the guardians who were able to help us be safe and have fun on this trip- thank you! 😊

📚 This week in reading we have focused on cause and effect. We read stories that helped us identify the cause and effect of certain events and feelings. We were able to transfer this learning into our daily life by making observations of the things around us. We also continued our work with rhyming by playing a few interactive rhyming games such as I have... who has..., rhyming match, and rhyming bingo.

🔢 This week starts our first look at subtraction in the classroom. We have been talking, manipulating, and writing number sentences that express how we can take apart numbers as well as how we can take from numbers. You can help your child with these concepts at home by gathering a group of objects, telling how many in all and then asking them to show two groups taken apart from the whole. You can then ask them to put the groups back together to make an addition equation!

🖊 This week in writing we worked on checking our story. We want to make sure everyone can read our story- even us! We realized that sometimes we write something a little sloppy, don't have spaces, or are missing some details and then when we go to read our story to someone we can't. We know that authors edit their stories, and we can too! We go back and read our story again to make sure we have it just right.

🌳 We have begun our new science kit this week: Materials and Motion! This kit focuses on how we can use materials in different ways. We will focus on one material at a time and how it can be changed or put into motion. Our first material is wood! What a great material to start with as we have been learning so much about trees in our last science kit!

🌷 Spring Break 🌷