News for the Week of December 10th

It is hard to believe the students only have 3 days left of this semester!  It goes by SO fast!  We will have a lot of holiday fun this week!  Here is a photo of our class's shoe box lid Christmas tree.

In math this week, we began a new unit on measurement.  We started with learning all about length.  We used vocabulary such as "shorter than" and "longer than" to compare the length of various objects.  We drew number cards from a stack and made trains out of unifix cubes.  For instance, if we drew a "7" card, the students built a train that was 7 cubes long.  Then they compared it to a strip of paper they pulled out of a baggie.  They discussed with their group partners if their cube train was longer or shorter than their paper strip.  We will continue working with length next week and will make a "measurement" Christmas tree.

In language arts, we read the poem, Please Do, which focused on the sight word "do."  We wrote the word "do" several times, looked for rhyming words in our poem and then colored the illustrations.  We read Snowmen at Night, by Mark and Caralyn Buehner, and we made a picture of our own snowman and wrote about him.  Our artwork and writing is displayed in the hallway.  We responded in writing to the question, "What does your snowman do at night?"  We also read The Wild Christmas Reindeer by Jan Brett and discussed why we thought different events happened in the story.  We then created a directed drawing of a reindeer and it is displayed in our hallway now.  Come and see it!  The students enjoyed the book The Snowy Day, by Ezra Jack Keats.  We made text-to-self connections to this story by drawing a picture of what the character, Peter, from the story did in the snow and what we have done in the snow.  We also spent a lot of time this week working on a cute gift for all of you parents!  We hope you will LOVE it!  During our word study, we got behind due to the gift we are working on for our parents.  We did begin work on one lesson where we identified colors and read color words.  Then we wrote the color words.  We will catch up on our word study this upcoming week.  We continued our work in our handwriting book by forming the letters q, x and z and wrote a few words and a sentence.

In science, we discussed properties of water and made a list such as clear, wet, clean, dirty, cold, warm, etc.  We then compared two samples of water (tap water and river water).  We observed them and then drew and colored them in our science notebooks and labeled them with property words.  We also made a picture of a way soil is used and wrote about how soil is used.  We then took an assessment on rocks, soil and water.  Our next science unit will be Weather.

The Monkeys were excited to learn all about our superstar student, Agastya!

We were able to learn all about Agastya's life and interests!  We will announce the next superstar student on Friday, January 11th.

Reminders

Please have your child return their book envelope if they have not already.  I will not send out new books this Monday due to the short week and the long winter/Christmas break.

Please donate empty toilet paper or paper towel rolls for our STEAM night project.

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

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

Dec. 19th   Winter Party, 2:00 p.m.
12/20-1/7  Winter Break-No School

1/8            Classes Resume

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

None

Morris December Birthdays:

Victoria-12/7