Newsletter: Week 12

Friday, November 13, 2009
Miss Wagenaar

Reminders/Notices:
•Class Books: Class books are being sent home, when your child brings home a book, please enjoy it with them, sign it and return it in a timely manner. This will allow the most students to get an opportunity to enjoy the book.
•Thankful Turkey Feathers: Your children have brought home several pieces of construction paper to use for making feathers and writing one thing that they are thankful for. Please help them to complete this assignment; they can be sent in whenever they are completed this week.
•Book Orders: Please take the time to look over the holiday book orders and submit them either online or by sending them back in by Friday November 20th.

This Week:
•We took a break from storytelling in Writers Workshop, and focused on phonetic spelling but stretching out the words and writing down all of the sounds that we hear (especially focusing on the first and last sounds).
•In Reader’s Workshop we talked about making connections to the reading, using the words “This reminds me of…”
•In Math we are working on a variety of different ways of making patterns; with arrows, with our bodies, and creating pattern snakes.
•We discussed the importance of Veterans Day and giving thanks and showing respect to those who have fought to defend our country – we decorated badges that the children could wear to celebrate. I was really impressed with the mature conversation and the students sharing about their grandparents who served our country.
•We used our handprints to create festive turkeys for our back window.
•On Friday, the students enjoyed a wonderful performance of Sword in the Stone.


Next Week:
We will continue working on strategies for phonetic spelling by stretching words, trying to integrate it into our Writers Workshop.
In Readers Workshop, we will be introducing our new star book The Three Billy Goats Gruff.
We will be finishing up our unit on patterns, talking about the pieces that make up our patterns.
We will be discussing the past and how things have changed and are different than now.
We’ll be creating a new class book, it will be based on the book The Potluck. Students will be asked to think of a food that begins with the same letter as their name.

Questions to ask your child
1.Help your child think of a food that starts with the first letter of their name.
2.Ask your child what they like to do or a friend that they like to play with at choice time.