Week 10 11/9- 11/13

Guess What We Did      Monday      11/9

We walked to Friends Free library this morning to visit our friend, Stephen. Stephen read a story to the children and then they were able to pick out books to bring back to our classroom for our Reading Center.

Work time had us working on our 5 senses graph again and reading our mini book on senses together. We also worked on creating patterns with unifix cubes. We began a new arts and craft project, as well. The children are practicing tracing and cutting a pumpkin out of orange construction paper and leaves from green construction paper. Using glue on their cut pumpkin and sprinkling pumpkin spice on top had them also using their sense of smell when finished:>) We are creating a "pumpkin patch" for Thanksgiving on our kitchen bulletin board.

Circle time has us completing our calendar work and adding a turkey sticker to the calendar on Thanksgiving. The children learned that Thanksgiving is always the 4th Thursday of the month. We counted the days then and discovered that this year Thanksgiving will be the 26th day of November and that we have 17 more days until the celebration. Ask your child to show you our sticker. We also reviewed the names of various bones and our organs. Each day a different child is wearing our skeleton costume as we discuss our skeletons...bones, ligaments, muscles, joints, etc. Another child is wearing our body apron which we introduced today. Ask your child about it. We are learning about our lungs, heart, liver, esophagus, stomach, large and small intestines, and kidneys. Both of these activities are located on our science shelf in the back of the room now along with our "body doll."

FYI: We will be beginning two new activities. We are replacing "Friendly Ghosts" this month with "Thankful Turkeys":>) It will work the same way. The children will affirm a friend for doing something nice for them by giving them a Thankful Turkey and saying "thank you." Please continue to make a big deal about it when your child comes home wearing one. The children will learn about this change tomorrow.

We also will begin a new morning responsibility for the children. It is call "Morning Message."  A "Morning Message" will be written each day on our white board. We will begin tomorrow at circle by showing it to the children. We will start out with a very short message each day. Tomorrow it will read:

Morning Message

Good morning!

Today is Tuesday.

Today is Spanish.

We will ask the children to "read" the message each morning with you after completing their other responsibilities. If you are not able to come into the classroom then either Barbara or I will read it with them. You will notice that the initial letter of each word will be written in a different color than the rest of the words. Our strategy will be to remind the children that that particular word begins with that corresponding letter's sound. The children will begin learning by repetition other sight words like "is" in the beginning. We will count the words each day and remember that words are made up of letters written next to each other and that words have meaning to the reader. We will also begin to learn about sentences and punctuation...periods, "shouting marks," and question marks:>)  Barbara and I are asking you to read the words with your child and as you do, to "track" or point to each word as you read it together. Our time line will help us with figuring out the day and the Special for that day as your child reads with you. Thank you in advance for all your help!  (And again please don't worry if you are not able to be with your child to complete this new responsibility...Barbara and I will do it with him/her).

Thank you. Roe and Barbara

  Guess What We Did    Tuesday     11/10

We took place this morning in our first "shelter-in-place" drill today. Barbara and I explained to the children that just as we practice fire drills to keep safe when there is a fire inside our school, we want to practice how we can be safe when there is something unsafe outside, as well. We were very proud of the children as they listened and then followed our directions. We quietly went inside our hallway area and remained quiet until we were told that the practice drill was over. Talk to your child about what we did today. Please let us know if your child was scared and let us know what your child is saying , if anything, about the drill. Thank you.

At work time, we finished our pumpkin sense of smell project, played our Apple/Sound game, and played some games of Candy Corn Bingo. A few children also put on our skeleton costume and our body apron:>) Ask your child to show you! Our Special today was Spanish and Sandra went over Spanish names for people in a family... la familia. She also read a book in Spanish about animals and their mothers. Then the children practiced their holiday concert songs.

At 1st circle, we picked our Special Child of the Day and completed our calendar work. Charlie did a great job leading our work today:>) Barbara and I introduced our Morning Message and we read it together. Tomorrow, the children know that they have one more responsibility...to read the Morning Message either with you or with Barbara or me. Today, we read the message, paid close attention to the initial letter of each word and then counted the words altogether in the message. We also looked at the ending of each sentence... period or shouting mark. (We talked about a sentence being words that mean something to the reader.)

Makhai shared a book about the blue whale today as our Guest Reader. We learned that the blue whale is a mammal, ask your child why. We also learned that the blue whale is the biggest animal in the world.  We will continue to read more about whales in preparation for the Whale Lady who will visit us on December 10th:>) More on that in a future Guess What We Did.

Thank you. Roe and Barbara

  Guess What We Did. Wednesday 11/11

Our big news today is that we are the proud caretakers of Beefee, Barbara's ferret for a few weeks! He is very cute and we love him already:>) Please read about him with your child... information about this adorable mammal is in folders that came home today. Ask your child all about him.

We are beginning our All About Me theme project now. Barbara took her turn today and told us all about herself and her family. Look at our All About Me bulletin board in the back of the room to learn more about Barb:>) I will share a little about myself next Monday and we will go by "cloud strategy order" after that to give each child a turn, as well, to tell about himself or herself.

We also welcomed Mat, Raphael's father, to our classroom this morning. Mat did a sense experiment with us. We wanted to test out our hypothesis. Does our sense of  taste depend only on our tasting with our mouths or does our sense of smell also have to do with what we are tasting? Each of us made a hypothesis and then Mat led us in the experiment. Ask your child:>) Mat had 5 bags of jelly beans, each a different flavor. He had the children either take a turn being blindfolded or take a turn picking out a jelly bean to give to the blindfolded person. The child who was given a jelly bean had to hold his/her nose and then chew the jelly bean and tell which flavor it was. Then the taster let go of his/her nose and told again what flavor it was. Mat recorded the data on a large piece of paper... the children who thought our sense of taste depended only on our tasting were wrong most of the time when they guessed what flavor they were tasting and the children who thought our sense of taste also depended on our sense of smell were right more times than the other group.  Try this experiment at home when you have a chance:>) Taste something while holding your nose and then let your nose go while you continue chewing. Was your sense of taste affected? Make your hypothesis and record your data. Ask your child about our experiment today! A special thank you to Mat for a great science learning activity and for some really delicious jelly beans!

At work time today, we played a new game called Body Bingo. This game reviews the names of parts of our body, bones, joints, and muscles. Our Special today was gym. Rob had the children jumping with two feet and hopping with both feet and with one foot. The children will be learning how to play hopscotch next week in gym:>)

At circle, we completed our calendar work. We also read our Morning Message together. We looked at the initial letter in each word as we read them, noticed the spaces between each word (we call them meatball spaces!), counted how many words were in the Morning Message, and then counted all the letters, too. The children will begin to notice another sight word, the word "is" as it is repeated each day in the Morning Message. See if your child can recognize that word as well as the sight words "the," "I," and "a" when looking at a book or reading together now. Thank you for your help in completing this responsibility with your child when you can.

FYI: These common sight words are also referred to as "popcorn" words in school because they "pop up" in books all the time:>)

At 2nd circle, we read a book called, "The Brain" and we looked at a book called "The Digestive System" that Elan shared with us. We also read a fiction book called "Pete the Cat Gets a Pet" in honor of Beefee joining our classroom.

Our middle school friend, Michaela, joined us at rest time and read to some of the children.  

Busy, but good day!  Roe and Barbara

*Look for very adorable pictures in folders tonight!

 Guess What We Did  Thursday  11/12

We welcomed Ryan this morning to our classroom along with his guitar:>) He played for us as we all sang.  Ask your child. The children especially liked singing "This Land is Your Land" and at lunchtime and at Good-Bye circle began singing it on their own!

Work time today consisted of learning a new game called Golden Apple and a new activity called the Dancing Skeleton. Ask your child about both of these new work jobs. Let your child teach you one morning when you have time. We also continued creating lots and lots of patterns...patterns that Barbara and I asked for to try to "stump" the children and patterns that the children created to try to stump their teachers:>) Practice making patterns at home and see if your child can stump you!

Our Special today was Spanish. Sandra taught the Spanish words for front (delantera), back (atras), up (arriba), and down (abajo) as the children acted out each command. The children also practiced their winter concert songs.

Our birthday girl, Julia, was our Special Child of the Day today and she led our calendar work. She did a great job! We sang Happy Birthday to her and feasted on delicious birthday cupcakes that she brought in to share with us. Thank you, Julia:>) We returned to circle then and read our Morning Message together. We also read a book about whales. We learned that there are two kinds of whales...toothed whales and baleen whales. We will continue to read more about this sea mammal in the next few weeks. The Whale Lady is scheduled to visit us on Thursday, December 10th...more about her in a future Guess What We Did:>)

We are beginning to have some Guest Readers in our classroom now. Please remember that "picture reading" is also reading and a good way to gain confidence in the early stages of learning how to read.

At our final circle, we read an Amelia Bedelia book and laughed at all the homophones in the story. We all noted that Amelia Bedelia does not get homophones at all:>)

Guess What We Did  Friday  11/13

We began the day with a lower school assembly. The children were able to see a little bit of the play the 3rd to 5th graders were putting on tonight and will also put on tomorrow afternoon called "Beauty is a Beast." It was very cute.

Our school counselor and friend, Jeff, came to visit us after we returned to  our classroom. Jeff talked to the children about the importance of making good choices..."positive discernment." He introduced another "people tool" from our tool box...the stoplight. He talked about the lights on a stoplight and what they mean on our people tool strategy. Red means to stop and then yellow follows reminding us to think about making a right choice...the one that would lead to a "positive impact"

to those around us and to us, and finally green which means to do the right thing. The children shared some times that they had to make a choice, sometimes a hard one, and what they did. We talked about times in our classroom that we have to make the right choice and that it takes courage many times to do that. We have had this conversation before in our classroom. The children know that blaming someone else for making a negative choice is not accepted and that they are responsible for the choices they make each day and that it takes courage to stand up and do the right thing. It was a good lesson and conversation. Talk to your child about all this when you have time. The lesson ended with the children coloring appropriately a stoplight on paper. So far, we have 4 "tools" displayed on the Talk-It-Over shelf, the mini Talk-It-Over chairs, the little Hug Bear, our motor meter calming jar, and now our stoplight. We also have a poster hanging up that shows a stoplight and what it means as a "tool."

Lehla came to work with us today. She introduced a new memory game to the children. In this game, you can play matching shapes, numbers, or words. She introduced the shape memory game today. Lehla also had the children adding words to the Word Wall this week. She asked each child to think of a word they wanted to know how to write. When they did, she wrote down each word and asked them to place their word in the appropriate place on the Word Wall. Ask your child on Monday which word he/she added and ask to see it on the Word Wall:>)

At 1st circle, we completed our calendar work and counted how many days there are until Thanksgiving. We read a book then about whales. We learned about the flukes, the flippers, and the dorsal fin and what their jobs are. Ask your child what a whale baby is called and why a mommy whale has to push its baby to the surface of the water as soon as it is born. We reviewed the two kinds of whales... toothed and baleen and talked about different examples of both. Research whales together this weekend and let your child share on Monday what new fact he/she has learned:>)

At 2nd circle, we read the Morning Message together. We used our spaghetti strategy (a pipe cleaner!) and our meatball strategy (a pom pom!) to show the tiny spaces in between letters of a word and the big spaces between words as we read our message. 

We counted the letters in the message and the words. We began talking about sentences and how words come together in sentences to make sense to the reader. We talked about telling sentences needing a period at the end, question sentences needing a question mark at the end, and shouting sentences needing a shouting mark or exclamation point at the end. Thank you for all your help these past few days reading the Morning Message with your child.

FYI: We plan on visiting Woodmere Museum on Wednesday, December 9th, to see our art on display and to look at other art. The cost of this trip is $8/child. Permission slips will come home in folders soon. Thank you.

We will begin finding 6 letters in our names now and signing them!

Have a wonderful weekend! Roe and Barbara