Friday, December 8, 2017

December 8th Highlights

Hello families,

We've had another wonderful week together. During our morning meetings we continue to practice math and literacy skills within our usual routines. This week we looked for sight words in our morning messages and our December songs. We practice math skills when doing our calendar routine and "counting the days" in which we are keeping track of how many days we've been in school and how many days are left of school.



Our read alouds this week followed one of our favorite authors, Mo Willems, who does a great job of bringing characters to life, using ellipses to show that there is more going on, writing exact actions, speech, feelings and thoughts, and makes important words pop out. This week we read together: I Really Love Slop!, I'm Invited to a Party!, and  A Big Guy Took My Ball! 

On Tuesday we participated in the schoolwide "Hour of Code" using the Kodable app on our iPads. We practiced Sequence, putting directions in order to make the puffball robot follow a path to the end. We practiced giving left/right, up/down directions, putting in a color to help the puffball know when to turn, giving repetitive directions in an efficient way with a repeat code, and using brackets to show a longer repeated direction code.  It was so much fun!!











In math we continue working with patterns. Each day we focused on a different skip counting pattern (10, 5, 2). We highlighted the pattern and used this to help us orally count forward and backward following the skip count pattern of the day. We practiced adding to 10 to make our teen numbers. Adding to 10 was really fun and easy! We then learned how to "find 10 and add on" when adding other numbers to make adding easier. Knowing our combinations of 10 really helped us use this strategy. Here's what it looks like:








We are beginning to use the "Find 10, Add On" strategy when solving addition story problems. We continued using patterns to help us solve combination problems. We also highlighted skip counting patterns by 10, 5 and 2 on our 120 charts. We used these to help us play "number zip."



We are beginning to wrap up our Small Moments writing unit. Many students this week worked with a partner to revise their latest story, adding more details to make it even better. Then they did editing on their own: checking for punctuation, capital letters where they belong, word wall words spelled correctly, most of the sounds in the words they wrote (inventive spelling), and spaces between words.



In word study we continue practicing spelling consonant-vowel-consonant words like: hip, not, lug, pet, mad. We also study sight words/trick words (common words that don't always follow the spelling rules). So far we've studied these trick words: the, a , and, his, is, of, my, we, in, it, let, do, on, I, me, had, can, get. 

We also began a new science unit this week about light waves and properties of light. We'll connect this to another science study: daylight patterns and our place in space. We read Sun Up, Sun Down as an introduction to these new science concepts. Next week we'll continue having read alouds connected to our science concepts. Here are some snapshots from our first light exploration, trying out different materials to see what things let through all light, some light, or no light.





Dates to Remember:
Wednesday December 13 - Early Release at 12:15 (Teacher In-Service) - no after school activities -- all students dismissed at 12:15
Thursday December 14 - Winter Concert (students in classrooms at 6:00 pm; performance begins in the gym at 6:30 pm)
Monday December 18 - Library 11-11:30 am
December 25 - January 2 - Winter Break -- No School
Wednesday January 3 - School resumes

Have a great weekend!
❤ Mrs. Fox


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