News for the Week of September 24th

Fall is here!  Well, Texas style fall.  It was nice to have some cooler mornings this week.  It will be great when the humidity goes away!  The Monkeys told me one morning, "It's cold!"  Haha!  They are definitely living in Texas.

In math this week, we continued our unit on Sorting and Classifying/2D & 3D Shapes.  The students learned more about squares, circles and rectangles this week.  We discussed how many sides they had, how many points or corners and we learned about curved lines and straight lines.  We sorted many shapes, as well as pictures of numbers and letters into the categories, "straight lines," "curved lines," or "both."  We have continued to enjoy our math stations and guided math.  We will continue working with shapes and sorting next week.

In language arts, we read the poem, What Is It?, and focused on the sight word, "it."  We wrote the word "it" several times and looked for rhyming words in our poem.  We worked on making and reading many emergent reader books this week to add to our book boxes.  These books are early readers for students and will be fun for them to read to their reading buddies.  We look forward to meeting our 3rd grade reading buddies this upcoming Friday afternoon.  Kindergarten and third grade will get to read with each other every Friday afternoon this year!  Mrs. Morris was busy assessing students to help prepare for the fall conferences the week of October 8th.  We will be able to see your child's strengths and look at areas to work on this year.  Next week in language arts, we will integrate social studies and read and learn about a few people in history that helped contribute to our nation and state.  During our word study, we played the alphabet soup game with the letters in our name with partners.  It was fun to draw letters from the "soup" bowl and determine if they were in our name or our partner's name.  We also listened to stories that had rhyming words and identified those words.  We then thought of other words that could rhyme, too.  In writing, we continued our stories and began new stories.  We focused on sounding our the words we wanted in our stories.  We also watched Mrs. Morris write stories and focus on spaces in between words and return sweep at the end of a line.  Our class also continued work in our handwriting book and worked on the forming the letters O, Q and G.  

In science, we began our unit Heat Causes Change.  We had to come up with ideas of how to get teddy bear counters that were frozen in ice out of the ice.  The students told me to put one in the sun, put one in a bowl of water, use the hair dryer on one and to use the body heat from our hands on another one.  We were surprised that the teddy bear ice cube that we put in the water melted faster than the one we used the hair dryer on.

Our class discussed ways to make popsicles with some apple juice I had in the classroom.  We finally decided to pour some in little cups and put a popsicle stick in them.  We put them in the freezer and the next day we observed how they froze.  Then the students enjoyed the popsicles outside and noticed how their body heat melted them back to the liquid form.

We recorded our observations in our science notebooks.  We had the most fun this week making applesauce on Friday!  The students felt a piece of apple with their hands.  We then took other cut up apples and added them to a crock pot with water, sugar and cinnamon.  We turned on the heat and got to see how heat changed the apples.  We enjoyed yummy applesauce at the end of the day!

We will finish our unit on changes from heating and cooling next week.

We really had a lot of fun on Friday doing activities centered around apples all day long!  We made a book about apples, we created an apple from construction paper and labeled the parts of the apple, we listened to nonfiction books about apples, we tasted a piece of red, green and yellow apples & voted on our favorite (red won) and we did some apple math!

The Monkeys are looking forward to learning all about our superstar student, Luka, next week!

Reminders

If you are able to contribute to the class parties/100th day & Zero the Hero prizes fund and have not yet, please send back the letter with your check for Jeanette Dunbar and I will get it to her.  This fund helps pay for each of our 3 parties this year and all of the Zero the Hero prizes and the 100th day of school activities.  Thank you!

Please be sure to check out the "Dates to Remember" below. 

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

Oct. 8        Student Holiday/Parent~Teacher Fall Conferences
Oct. 9        Student Holiday
Oct. 12      PTA Movie Night, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
Oct. 17      Bush's Chicken Spirit Night, 4-7 p.m.
Oct. 19      Kona Ice, after school

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

Luka!

Morris September Birthdays:

Siddhant-10/24

Happy Birthday Ethan!