Week of November 7 - 11

Dear Parents,

Last week was a lot of fun! Thanks for coming to our Costume Parade and for your help making our class party on Monday a success. It’s always fun to use our imagination and play with the ideas of Halloween... my hat’s off to the students for their bravery with all our games. 

Speaking of bravery, the scholars did an outstanding job this week listening to sounds and building words.  We will continue to play our phonics games in class (see last week’s post) to prepare us for reading.

This week’s spelling list has FOUR words. I’m adding three new sight words and one word we’re learning in Max (see below). Also, we’re are almost done reviewing our alphabet letters. This week we’ll be doing P, Q, R, S, T... yes, one letter per day!  

Drum roll please... This week marks our first leap into beginning reading! We are starting a phonics series that has been around since the 1970’s. It’s a great tool to help the scholars hear sounds, implement sight words, and build rhyming words.  Our first book is Max, from Series A (short vowel sounds). Working with a partner, we will read this book throughout the week with the goal of learning to read the whole thing by ourselves. 

We are beginning Chapter 2 in our math workbook. My original thought was to do a chapter per week, but I think we’ll go slower and do a chapter every two weeks (and pick up the pace in the last half of the year). In terms of our number recognition, we’ve started to explore the concept of counting by two’s and putting things in pairs.

Thanksgiving Project (OPTIONAL)

In this week’s homework packet is the project assignment for the month of November. It is due on Wednesday, November 23rd (the day before Thanksgiving vacation).  It’s a family project that I hope you’ll have fun completing. 

To incorporate physical properties of matter into Thanksgiving (because, really, what holiday of giving thanks would be complete without it?), we are going to build the Nina, the Pinta, or the Santa Maria!  In class, we are going to learn about how boats float (i.e. the bigger the boat, the more it holds). Your assignment is to build a boat that 1) holds three Thanksgiving objects of your choice and 2) floats!  See the assignment for more information (like the “optional” clause!) 

As Always...

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to email me, stop by the classroom, talk to Ms. Diane, or leave a comment on our blog.  Please become a “follower” of our blog and “like” our school’s Facebook page, if you haven’t already done so.

Have a terrific week!

Mrs. Stuhr