December 5

Dear Fish Families:

Here is a glimpse of our busy week together:

Writers' Workshop:  We are writing like scientists! The children are working on taking their observations and writing/drawing/labeling across more than one page. The are stretching out words to write the sounds they hear and are being reminded to leave a 2 finger space between each word they write.

Readers' Workshop:  Your readers learned that readers go back and re-read when they get stuck on a word, fix a mistake, or if something doesn't make sense. They are learning to use all the strategies (superpowers) they have learned when they come to a word they don't know. We have been talking about the sequence of stories using various gingerbread stories. The children are talking about similarities and differences with different variations of this tale. We had a book talk using The Napping House. We focused on what happened at the beginning and ending of the story. The children then discussed the events in the middle of the story. They were making great personal connections, talking about parts we liked or found funny, and lots of  predicting was happening!

Math:  Through the use of attribute blocks, the children classified and sorted by shape, size, and color. The also counted the number of blocks in each group. We talked about sorting rules. As an extension of this lesson, the children identified missing blocks from sorted sets. A challenging activity for the children this week was identifying shapes using touch and not sight. Shapes were placed in a "feely box" and the children had to pick out shapes by attribute (ie. a 3 sided shape with 3 vertices, or a 4 sided shape with all 4 sides being equal length). We made a class bar graph of our favorite colors and compared numbers. 

Visual Arts:  We made winter trees and snowpeople this week. We will be using them to make a class winter quilt on our bulletin board. We are also making gingerkids!

Book of the Week:  The Gingerbread Man by Karen Schmidt

Song of the Week: "The Gingerbread Man" by Jack Hartmann

Donation Requests:

• rick rack
• small craft buttons
• ribbon
• foam stickers

Up Coming Events:

• Gingerbread stories unit
• Early Release-12/17
• Monday, 12/22 at 2:05 Gingerbread decorating party (families welcome)
• Winter Break- 12/24-1/2
• Word of Week- the
• Handwriting- I, T, & J
• Phonics- s and z

Fondly,

Kristen