Reading:
In reading this week, we reviewed a few of our reading strategies. We focused on retelling familiar stories with the beginning-middle-end, comparing and contrasting two stories and respond to questions about a story. It was a great week of learning and revisiting strategies we have learned and practiced before.
We also learned all about the -ot family. To kick off our learning of this word family, we watched a video that had us reading and learning new words that end with the -ot sound. We built words in the -ot family, we went on a word hunt where we chopped the sounds up in the word and found it in a pile of other -ot words and we practiced rhyming with all of the words in the -ot family.
Our vocabulary words this week went with the story The Polar Express. We loved learning all about the words wrapped, rustle, insisted, pranced, charged, crowded. Later in the week we reviewed these words by acting each of them out. Our favorite was when we all squished together and were quite “crowded” in one tight space!
Our new sight words: are, come
**Be sure to keep the white sight word cards from week to week and continue to practice all of them as new ones are sent home every week.
Our Poem of the Week:
iPad Fun:
Reading
- Book Creator: We used the QR codes from last week where we scanned the codes that took us to a holiday themed photo. After revealing the photo, students opened up a book in Book Creator and created their own holiday picture book. They drew a picture of the item, wrote the word and recorded saying the word. When the book was finished, they saved it and uploaded it to Google Classroom!
- Google Classroom: We uploaded our Book Creator stories into Google Classroom. We are getting better and better at learning how to do this task independently!
- QR Codes:. We scanned QR codes that took us to various videos and books read aloud about different holidays around the world!
Math
- Book Creator: This week students used the app Book Creator on their own by adding a journal entry of the activity number of the day! We have been doing number of the day as a whole class since the first week of school and they are now experts and are able to do this on their own! They rolled a dice to find their number, wrote the number, the number word, drew the dice, tally marks, number of shapes and number line! They finished the activity by recording their voice explaining their thinking and what they did with the number of the day.
Writing:
Writer’s Workshop this week, we reviewed and finished our first writing unit all about True and Fantasy stories! We took our post-test on this writing topic I cannot wait to grade them and see each student’s improvement from the pre-test to the post-test! We continued the week by working on our letters to Santa. We first illustrated four different gifts we would like to receive for Christmas and then we chose one of them to write about. We made a copy of the letters and are sending one directly to the North Pole by dropping them off at a mailbox in the mall at Macy’s and the other are on display in the hallway. We will get to take those home next week!
Math:
Math this week focused on reviewing several skills we have practiced this past nine weeks. We worked on recognizing numbers with our stocking numbers activity, length with our tree size activity, we created various holiday and winter themed pictures using shapes and tan-grams to make the picture and we spent some of our math time working on a special parent gift to give our families this holiday season.
Content:
This week was all about the Polar Express and Holidays!
- Monday--We worked on becoming the illustrators of the Polar Express book and completed the cover.
- Tuesday--We completed page 1 and 2 of our Polar Express book.
- Wednesday--We completed pages 3 and 4 of our Polar Express book.
- Thursday--We completed the last pages of the Polar Express book.
- Friday--We had an entire day of Polar Express fun! We started off by “riding” the Polar Express train right into our classroom and watched the first part of the movie with hot chocolate and donuts, we then took a break and had our classroom book exchange, after that we finished the movie with juice and popcorn! In the afternoon we completed a craft called “the first gift of Christmas” just like in the movie! We had an exciting day and it was spent in our pajamas, which made it quite the cozy day!
Social Emotional Learning (SEL):
Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.
This week’s SEL focus was learning about HONESTY. Honesty is ... being truthful in what we say and do. Honesty can be demonstrated through what we say, such as through telling the truth, including only facts, and admitting when we are wrong. Honesty can be demonstrated through what we do (our actions), such as through working hard and using our own abilities to complete a task, returning things that belong to others, and following through with our promises.
We talked this week about how when someone else is not being honest with us how that makes us feel. Not only is it important for us to be honest, but also to have others treat us with the same respectful honesty back.
A few discussion questions to talk with your child at home about this topic:
-Is there ever a time that it is okay to lie? Talk about it.
-Describe a time someone lied to you, what did they lie about? How did it make you feel?
-Name three reasons why it’s important to tell the truth.
PRACTICE AT HOME:
Talk about giving this weekend and why giving is important. Try to focus on not only giving presents, but giving in other ways like giving smiles, compliments, help and more!
Next Week:
- In reading we will focus on reading our favorite books.
- In writing we will complete a few holiday writings!
- In math we will review previous skills.
- Our theme next week is all about Holidays and Elves!
Important Dates/Information:
**Go to our classroom webpage if you want to see important dates on a calendar! I will update this classroom calendar as dates and events come about.
- 12/19--Elf Day
- 12/20--Ornament Day 1:45-2:45 if you signed up to send in a craft and/or bring a craft to create with the class, please let me know if you have any questions or need anything!
- 12/21--Last Day of First Semester
- 12/21--Purdue Basketball Game Behavior Celebration, don’t forget a sack lunch!
