Maplewood SchoolNewsletter for November 4, 2011
News From Room 113
November 4, 2011
Dear Families,The past three weeks have flown by. We have been busy reading about machines, trees, apples, pumpkins, and oceans! We have talked a lot about cycles: apple tree cycle, pumpkin cycle, cycle of the seasons, water cycle, and the butterfly cycle. We have been talking about settings, characters and genre of books. We have talked about different parts of non-fiction books. We have made several class books too!
We invited our first grade friends to our class for our second round of plays. Our four plays were about pigs, bats, guinea pigs and autumn sounds. We wrote letters to our friends inviting them to our plays and received letters back! Our friends shared some songs with us while they visited and gave us wonderful compliments.
We have begun our science unit on trees. It is a unit that will last all year long. We have adopted two class trees. We went out and observed them and made scientific drawings of them. We took a trip out to the Wildwood to gather leaves. We looked at the leaves and sorted and classified them. We then made leaf rubbings to create the cover and back for our tree work. Next week we will be going out to the Wildwood to count the deciduous trees and the conifers using tallying marks, which we are learning about in math!
We have been being to work on writing a sentence to tell about the pictures we are drawing. We are using a program called Kid Writing. We are asking kids to put down the sounds they hear in words. If a child cannot identify any of the sounds, when they draw a line (we call it a magic line) to hold the space for the word. Once the student has written the sounds, we are then writing the sentence in “adult spelling”. I encourage you to encourage your child to write at home stretching the sounds and writing the sounds they hear.
We had a wonderful time parading around the gym in our costumes. We used our patterning skills to decorate our costume parade picture. I am very thankful that Jolea, Holden’s mom, provided us with apples and dip for a treat. A big thank you to Deborah and Jill, Justin and Chloe’s moms, for serving us our treats.
We have spent the past two days working in our kindergarten garden bed. We cleaned the bed out, turned the soil and then planted bulbs for a spring “rainbow”. Thank you to Jolea and Deborah for your help with the garden work.
Thank you to all the families who have returned the conference form that came home a couple of weeks ago. It would be very helpful for me to have it by Monday so I can prepare for our conference.
November 14-22, our PTA will be hosting a Book Fair. Our class will have the opportunity to go look at the books. They will have the opportunity to write down the name of a few books that look interesting to them. If you would like to send money with them after our “browsing day”, they will be able to go to the book fair and purchase a book. The book fair will also be open during conferences, so you will also have the opportunity to visit and browse. I will make it very clear to students that they do not have to bring money and that it is a choice to do so. Please let me know if you have any questions about the book fair.
Calendar
November 10 and 11 No school
November 14-22 Book Fair
Nov. 17 Picture retakes
November 21 and 22 Parent Teacher Conferences-No school
November 23-25 Thanksgiving Holiday
December 8 PTA meeting
December 14 Late Opening-9:50
December 16 Winter Solstice Celebration 10:00
December 19-30 Winter Break
January 2 School is back in session!
Ask Your Child…
*Tell me about your treasure hunt writing, what sea animal did you turn yourself into, why did you choose that animal
*Tell me about preparing the soil and planting a bulb in your garden bed
*Tell me about the new math game “Butterfly Race”
*Tell me about the new work place center with pattern block pictures
*Tell me about your mini-books about the ocean, what are some of the animals in the books
*Tell me about the new games you played in gym this week
*Show me and tell me about what you did in computer lab this week, tell me all the steps you did to create this graph
*Tell me about what you wrote in your journal this week
*Tell me about the literacy centers you did this week
*Tell me about the fall tree you painted, tell me all the steps it took to create your tree
*Tell me the facts you learned from non-fiction book about the ocean
*Tell me what the calendar pieces look like for November
*Tell me what you read with your reading buddy today
*Sing me part of the Navaho Happy Song you are learning to start the days in November
*Tell me what you have turned the “house keeping center” into
