Week of March 8, 2010

I hope everyone is staying warm and dry today! The weather leaves a lot to be desired. I am hopeful that Spring is just around the corner.

I wanted to send a quick reminder about our book fair at school. We will be visiting during our library time, which is Monday morning from 9:15 a.m. to 9:45 a.m and Monday afternoon from 12:45 p.m. to 1:15 p.m. You are more than welcome to come visit the book fair with your child.

Also, I submitted our class book order on March 2, so I am anticipating that the books you purchased will be arriving any day. I know the students are anxiously awaiting their arrival.

We continued to work hard this week. We learned a lot of new things in Math, Reading, and Science.

In reading, we continue to work on our sight words during our class meeting, guided reading groups, and workstations. We also practiced reading color words in text. The students read the following phrase:

I like green.

Green, green, green.

I like green frogs (I had a picture of a frog at the end of the sentence).

Then I changed the color words and the item, so the students could continue practicing the skill of reading color words in text. The other colors and items are as follows:

red and strawberries

purple and plums

yellow and bananas

pink and pigs

brown and bag

orange and pumpkin

black and tire

blue and jeans

After we read each phrase we talked about other items that could be that color. For example, the students said that cherries and a stop sign could also be red. In addition, we talked about the sequence of a story. I read, "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" by Eric Carle. The student had pictures that corresponded to the story. As a class, we put the pictures in order to retell the story. We also learned how to write the following letters: O, Q, and S.

In Science, we learned about the sense of hearing. We read, "Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?" by Eric Carle and "The Listening Walk" by Paul Showers. Also, we played a game during our class meeting that required the children to guess the objects I had hidden in plastic eggs while I shook the eggs. Finally, the children made maracas.

In math, the children practiced measuring items in our class by using a cutout the size of their foot. We talked about this practice and how it created the current day measurements. For example, before rulers or yard sticks were used, people used their arm span, their foot, or the thickness of their finger. Also, we learned how to count by 5's and use tally marks.

Workstations: