Nearby Nature!

 On Tuesday, we had our monthly Nearby Nature lesson with Christine and Jackson.  This month we were learning about how animals stay warm in winter and how they use different pieces of the ecosystem to help them survive the cold.  Through our puppet show and a memory match game, we learned that many animals stay active in the winter and have to conserve body heat by seeking out shelter or putting on extra fur, feathers, or fat.  Be sure to ask your child if he or she can tell you about some of these animals and how they stay warm!

During Reader's Workshop, we continued to strengthen are reading powers!  We talked about how readers re-read books to become more fluent in their reading.  We looked for patterns in the words of our emergent reader books and practiced reading those smoothly.  We also began to notice punctuation in our books and noticed how that helps us read the book.  We found exclamation points and question marks and changed the tone of our voices to match the punctuation.  We also got a new book for our book boxes from the Scholastic Let's Find Out magazine.  This book was about building snowmen and had a new sight word in it: be.  The children did a nice of job of following the pattern in the book, which helped them to read more smoothly and less like robots!

In math this week, we turned our attention to measurement and comparing numbers (greater than and less than).  We spent much of our math time using popsicle sticks and unifix cubes to measure the length of items in the classroom. Then we compared those numbers and talked about which were greater and which were less.  We also learned about the  <, >, and = signs that mathematicians use to compare numbers! Ask your child to tell you about the "shark mouth"!  Next week, we will work with coins: nickels, dimes, and pennies.





During Writer's Workshop, we continued to write our personal narratives with a beginning, middle, and end.  The children are continuing to tell their stories with detailed illustrations, but also adding more sentences.  I am so impressed with their work!  Our big focus for the week was putting spaces between our words.  This helps the reader better understand our stories!




We finished learning all of our lowercase letters and sounds this week in Fundations with Z and Q.  Now we are moving on to spelling and tapping out C-V-C words, such as map, cat, sit, etc.  For each letter in a word we tap a finger on our thumb and then "zip" the sounds together to say the word.  See if your child can tap out a word for you!  This knowledge will help with their reading and also their "best guess" spelling in Writer's Workshop.

Lastly, we welcomed a new student this week to our class!  The children were very excited to meet her and show her around our room and school!

Have a great weekend!