Eyes and Ears

Today each student got ears and eyes checked by the nurse!  

Fire Safety Assembly

Today we got a special visit from the firefighters and learned all about how to stay safe around fire. Ask your child about the song we sang about the smoke alarm. This is a great time to discuss your family's safe meeting place outside the house. 

A Short Week, But A Busy Week

This was another 4 day week that we packed full of learning and fun.  Our week began with a lesson on bus safety from some of the finest bus drivers in town.  Students learned about the danger zone, how to stay safe on the bus and how to properly evacuate the bus if necessary.

Some of our friends have shown an interest in learning how to tie shoes, so at our second recess I have been holding a shoe tying clinic!  It's great to see students teaching one another and spending their own recess time to work on this difficult skill.  Shoe tying uses fine motor skills and takes lots of practice and hard work!  

In reading workshop, students have been building their stamina with Read to Self but this week we also learned how to do Read To Someone.  This partner reading is great for working on fluency, expression, comprehension and cooperation.  Ask your child to recite the EEKK! poem we learned to help us remember how to do Read To Someone!  

Writing this week had a focus on personal narratives.  We started the process by identifying our lucky day.  Following that, students got in small groups to work on oral storytelling.  This is a great way to start the writing process for young children.  Telling the story aloud helps them feel confident in their ideas and eager to start writing it down.  Each student created a topic sentence for their narrative and will continue next week as we introduce transition words to help with sequencing.  

As we wind down our math unit on number sense and the hundreds chart, students got to play with the number puzzles and see if they could use their number sense to get the puzzle together accurately.  There was success all around!  

A huge thank you to Zibbi Wentz, Zarin's mom, who is our Junior Achievement volunteer this year.  She is coming in for 5 sessions.  JA Our Families introduces students to entrepreneurship and how family members' jobs and businesses contribute to the well-being of the family.

Super Science Friday, K-1 Fun Walk and Math, Math, Math

We continued looking at the differences between living and non-living things by doing more observations.  The students loved exploring living things inside the classroom.  They observed with their senses and used great describing words to share their findings.

The K-1 One Mile Fun Walk was a great way to start the day!  Students were energized and the weather was fantastic.  The walk kicked off with Jeff Hogan getting everyone up and moving with some stretches and then we were out the door!  

Our day was topped off by a visit from two high school senior football players.  Justin and Robert read us books and answered all of the questions we had for them.  Some of our own cheerleaders got up and did the Eagle Rumble for them also!  We can't wait for them to come back before the next home game!  If you make it to a game, be sure to look for #2 and #4!

Another Busy Week

Week three was filled with lots of learning and fun!  Our class took our first trip to the library to get reacquainted with where all of the books are and review the process for checking out books.  We will head back to the library on Wednesday (E Day) and be able to check out books for the first time!  Students were so excited to search for and look at familiar favorites and new books!

Each week we are adding a new poem to our Poetry Notebooks.  Throughout the week we practice reading them, create mental images, go on a punctuation hunt and look for rhyming that may be in the poem.  These notebooks are used during Reading Workshop for students to practice fluency.  Rereading familiar text is a wonderful way to practice reading smoothly and with expression.

We are working on our number sense as we build our math routines.  Today students worked to put a hundreds chart back together again.  Putting and writing numbers in order is a skill we practiced a lot this week and one you can practice at home also.  Try writing numbers 1-50 on Post-It notes or other pieces of paper and mix them up.  See if you and your child can work together to put them in the correct order.  Want a challenge?  Try starting at a number other than 1 or use larger numbers!

We ended the day with a walk in the woods with Mrs. Toplak's class and Mr. Emery!  With our clipboards and observation papers in hand, we searched for living and non-living things.  Although it was steamy, we worked hard and made some pretty amazing observations!