News for the Week of January 7th

It was great to have my monkeys back at school this week!  Time off to relax is great, but it is also nice to be back in a routine again.  I hope you all had a wonderful break!  We started off our week by remaking our social contract for this second half of the year.  The students contributed the words that they thought were important to follow, and then we all signed the contract.  We promised to be kind, respectful, gentle, calm, to listen, to use self-control, to put forth effort, no put-downs, etc.  Our class discussed why the social contract is important to follow and how it will help us be better students, friends and people.

In math this week, we focused on taller and shorter during our measurement unit.  The students compared items and used the vocabulary "taller," "shorter," or "the same," to describe the objects.  We will continue our measurement unit next week and focus on weight and capacity.

In language arts, we read the poem, I Am, which focused on the sight word "am."  We wrote the word "am" several times, looked for rhyming words in our poem and then colored the illustrations.  Our class also discussed New Year's Eve and New Year's day and the customs and traditions surrounding those holidays.  We discussed new year's resolutions and came up with our own resolutions.  We created a cute craft and wrote what our resolutions were.  Come and see our work that is hanging in the hallway!  We also began our unit called, "Asking Question, Finding Answers."  We created a chart about penguins by writing what we know about them, what we want to know about them and what we learned about penguins after researching them.  We read nonfiction books about penguins and listened to PebbleGo online.  We also watched a video about penguins.  We already knew a lot about penguins and learned even more interesting information.  We will be writing about what we learned and will make it into a book.  We will work on that this week and will then display them in the hallway.  We also worked on making a little book during word study about numbers.  We matched the numeral to the number word and wrote number words.  We also drew the amount of things for each number.  We continued our work in our handwriting book by writing some words and writing labels for a person's body parts.  We are almost done with our handwriting books and only have a few more weeks to work in them.

In science, we began to learn about how weather changes over the seasons.  We read about seasonal changes and made trees for each season and painted how the tree changes.  Next week, we will make a weather chart to track weather daily and we will continue to discuss and learn about seasonal changes.

The Monkeys are excited to learn all about our next superstar student, Leighton!

Reminders

Please work on making a shirt with 100 items on it for our 100th day of school on Friday, February 1st.  Your child will wear this shirt to school that day and we will have a parade through the hall.  

There will be a pink page with a note attached in this upcoming week's Tuesday folder.  It is titled, "My child has my heart because..."  Please complete the page and write about why your child has your heart and attach a picture of them to the heart shape in the lower left hand corner of the page.  Send these back to school with your child by Monday, January 28th.  We will display these in the hallway for the month of February.

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

Upcoming Dates to Remember: 

1/21          MLK, Jr. Holiday-NO SCHOOL
1/24          STEAM Night, 6-7 p.m.
1/31          Class Photo & Spring Individual Photos
2/1            100th Day of School
2/14           Valentine's Day Party

Superstars & Birthdays:

Morris Superstar:

Leighton!

Morris January Birthdays:

Agastya-1/18