January Learning Underway...

We are moving right through Unit 3 of Reading Street!  Our Amazing Words for this week are: celebration, sprinted, barn, blacksmith, arch, and soldier.  This week, we will be reading, “George Washington Visits”.   This story correlates very well with our question of the week: How is life today different from life hundreds of years ago?  The children will also be introduced to the concept of cause and effect as well this week.  However, we will continue to review the setting, plot, and characters of our stories! 

This week, we will be introducing the letters Dd and Kk and their associated sounds.  Both Dd and Kk are short, quick sounds; therefore, please do not allow your children to add the “uh” sound.  This can create difficulties for them when they segment words.  We will also be introducing two new sight words: “see” and “look”!  

We are planning to continue our work with our other sight words this week and using them to create awesome sentences!  Students will revisit the basic elements of writing sentences this week during both our whole group learning time and our center time.  Students should be able to show you how they start a sentence with a capital letter, use two finger spacing between words, and end their sentence with a punctuation mark.  Please continue to encourage your child to be writing at home on their days off.  We have really enjoyed having the children share their journal entries!

Centers will remain the same this week!

-Library Center: Students will be identifying the title, the characters in the story, and their favorite part of the story.

-Writing Center: Students will be answering a question by creating a sentence and illustrating their work.

-Math Center: Students will be exploring, comparing/contrasting, sorting, and discussing the shape’s properties. (2-D and 3-D)

-Art Center: Students will be creating a snowman and labeling all of the associated parts.

In math, we will be revisiting the concept of tens frames.  Having students think about numbers using frames of 10 can be very helpful and is a great way to establish number sense and mental math skills.  It also provides both a concrete and visual understanding of the base-ten number system.  Last week, we explored the numbers 11 and 12.  This week, we will be exploring 13 and 14.  Please continue to work with your child on these concepts at home, as well as counting.  Students need to be able to count to 50 by the end of the 2^nd quarter and 100 by the end of the year!!

Also, please remember that students will have their DIBELS assessments this week.  They will be assessed on letter naming, nonsense words, phoneme segmentation, and beginning sounds.  Their scores should come home in 1-2 weeks.

We hope that you have had a fantastic weekend.