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

Week of October 31 - November 4

Dear Parents,

Happy Halloween! Our Costume Parade in on Monday at 10:00 a.m. If you drop your child off around 8:00 a.m., we suggest he/she comes in regular clothes. The kids will have a chance to change before the parade. Please do pack, though, a change of clothes for your child (especially if you think he/she might get uncomfortable in a costume for the whole day).  Our party is at 1:30 p.m., but if you’d like to stay with us after the parade, we’ll be doing Halloween activities for the remainder of the day. Come celebrate with us!

On Tuesday, with my little glimmer of hope that the Halloween buzz has worn off, we will jump into an exploration of sounds and patterns. This week, we are going to begin our lessons on Phonemic Awareness (i.e. hearing and manipulating different sounds in words).  We will spend Tuesday-Friday playing games that give the scholars an opportunity to hear and play with words as sounds and groups. For example, we will solve rhyming riddles like this:

“You need me to play baseball. I rhyme with hat. What am I? BAT.”

We will learn songs that isolate sounds, like this:

“Twinkle, twinkle little word. What’s the new word to be heard? If I take off the first sound, what new word will now be found? Take the /F/ right off of FARM. Now the new word sounds like __________ (ARM).”

And, we will learn to blend sounds to make words by playing games like Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes, like this:

The word BUG would be /b/ (head), /u/ (shoulders), /g/ (knees). 

These activities will lead us into next week when we start to read decodable books during class. Decodable books are comprised of words that are easily sounded out (e.g. “Bill has a big ham.”). I’ll write more about it next week and explain what we’ll be doing. In the meantime, keep reading and pointing out words in books to your scholar... Continue to play rhyming games in the car or while you wait in line at the grocery store... Have fun exploring sounds and building words!

This week we will also be starting Chapter 2 in our math workbook: Patterns and Movement. We will build patterns with Legos and picture cards and look for patterns we see around our school. In terms of “movement,” we will be discussing “right” and “left” and as we make observations about the world around us.

P.S. The scholars are doing a FANTASTIC job studying the sight words! In two weeks, we will be adding one more word to the Friday spelling test, a decodable word from our week’s reading.  I hope my study cards are useful. If you’d like any help or suggestions on how to study and/or memorize the words, please slip me an email or stop by the classroom. 

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