Getting Sweet With Candy Words

Phonics: Thank you to the families that have been pulling out the games from the home/school folder and having your child work with you on it at home. They are located in the first sleeve in the blue folder.

What a great way to bring the classroom into the home. Last week we were introduced to 3 "tricky" words. ( one, two, three) These are words that don't play by the rules and you can't sound them out. We will continue to use them in our readers and practice them at stations.

To help practice the tricky words and our other words we are setting some goals with "Candy Words." These are just lists of words that your child can read and with practice, should be able to read fluently without having to sound them out.The words that are underlined are the tricky words.

We work with the words at stations, but thought it would be great to have them at home too! This week students were introduced to Candy Corn words. When they feel good about these words, they can read them to me at school and move to the next list- Candy Cane words. After that they will get some phrases to practice the words together. Kids love a challenge and I thought this might be a fun goal to set.

Writing: Next week students will bring home their first journals and some of the writing skills we have been working on. We use our journals during our Writers Workshop time. We spend lots of time writing together and talking about adding details. Students learned that they can use sticks, circles and boxes to make just about any picture. They also are working on adding more detail to the picture to make it interesting. This week in our new journals we are talking about labeling. Labeling is a great way to use sounds we know or words we know and tell about the picture. They had fun labeling our classroom, me and Mrs. Paulen's office this week!

Math: This week we are working on comparing numbers and groups of objects. We used the vocabulary "more", "less", "same", "equal". We also compared groups and talked about how many more one group has than another and how many less. This can be a tricky activity. Have fun working with cereal at home and comparing groups with no more than 10 in each group.

Literacy: Science and literacy are together again with the life cycle of plants, the parts of a plant, and what a plant needs to survive. We talked about germination-when a seed breaks open. We are trying to germinate some bean seeds in our window at school to watch the process, but the window is pretty cold. We also are enjoying our Science Station and many plants and planting items to explore.

This week we planted seeds and put them under a grow light since it is chilly in here on the weekends.

Congratulations to our STAR Students of the week!

Jase is a great student and kind friend! He loves to create and build. He is funny and full of laughter and jokes. We love his hard work and his kindness here at school!

Alana is a hard worker and the best "compliment-er" in the whole class! She works really hard at complimenting others so they feel loved.

Upcoming Important Dates

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In November, Mrs. Paulen has challenged our school to collect can goods and line our school with the donations. Can we line all the halls in our school? Items such as peanut butter, tuna fish, canned fruit and boxed macaroni and cheese are all in demand. We are also collecting new toys to donate to Project Christmas!