Celebrating the New Year with Lots of Learning

We had a wonderful transition back to school after the holiday break.  We reviewed the rules and expectations and the children were eager to continue our learning from where we left off in December.

Setting Goals

Last week, the children completed a 2017 Goals Flip book where the children shared some of their goals for this year, including something they want to get better at and something they want to learn more about.  This was a great activity to complete during our first week back.  These will be sent home in your child's Friday folder this week.

Snowmen at Night

This week's read aloud's were focused on the Snowmen at Night series, which includes Snowmen at Work and Snowmen All Year.  While reading Snowmen at Night, we worked on visualizing and focused on one particular page (where the snowmen went ice skating).  On this particular page, I only read the words to the children and didn't show them the picture.  They worked on creating an imagine in their thought bubble as I read the words.  Then, they completed an activity where they illustrated what they pictured.  I reread that particular page and we compared the illustration in the book to their illustrations they drew.  Lastly, we did some interactive writing by constructing a sentence together about what the snowmen were doing.

The vocabulary word that we focused from our read aloud was the word fright.  We looked closely how the author used this word in the story and then looked closely at how the illustration demonstrated this word. The children were asked to draw a snowman that looked a fright on the morning message this week.

Lastly, the children completed a writing and art project as an extension to the book Snowmen at Night.  The children wrote what they would do if they were a snowmen at night and then illustrated a picture using oil pastels on construction paper.  The pieces of art and writing are currently hanging in our classroom.

Math In math, we have begun working on adding and subtracting.  We have worked on these strategies through stories and using manipulatives.  We are currently working on adding and subtracting 1 within 10 (4 + 1 or 5 -1).  We have also been learning how to write equations, something that can be very tricky as it involves numbers and symbols.

This concept has carried on nicely with our January calendar pieces.  During our calendar time (Number Corner), we've been learning about number tress.  Number tress are used to break numbers apart.  Please see the example below.

We are continuing to count by 1's to 100 and practicing writing numbers to 20.

Writer's Workshop

We've been finishing up revising and editing our writing pieces that were in our folders.  We will begin a new unit next week. 


Reader's Workshop

We will beginning our next unit, Super Readers, next week.  In this unit we will be learning about some super reading strategies that will help us in our own reading along with working with  our "snap" (sight words) words.

Fundations

We have begun unit 2 of Fundations.  We will be reviewing uppercase letters and moving onto tapping out the sounds of CVC words such as map, sad, pat, etc.  This work with translate nicely into our reading and writing this second half of the school year. 

Computer Lab

This week we had our first visit to the computer lab, where we learned how to log into the computer using our username and password.  This is usually a tricky part of using the computers as the children need to learn to type in their first and last name and then their password.  They all persevered and kept trying even when they made mistakes.  They have also been working on the classroom computers to log on and off during explore time (their choice!).  Once they have become confident with logging on and off the computer, we will move forward to learning the Paint program and using Starfall.com.