Week of January 23rd

Greetings from the Red Room!

We wanted to give you few reminders for this week.

*Please remember to have your student bring a snack to school each day.  If your student is getting hot lunch, they still need to pack a morning snack.  We are happy to provide this for our students who occasionally forget this but we would love help on the home front!

*We have had a great time going down to the JRL room to check out our own books!  The students know his or her just right level and have enjoyed this privilege.  This is something that a parent volunteer helps us with.  Although we accompany the students to the room, the actual picking and checking out of the book is completed with the help of a parent.  We have noticed a couple notes from you, as parents, saying your student has already had the book.  If this happens, we would love your help in reminding the students to broaden his or her horizons and make a different choice of book next time!  We try to catch this before it happens but this is sometimes difficult!  Also, we understand that the books at times seem easy for your student.  We want to encourage you to work on the other pieces that your student needs to accomplish before they can move up.  They need to not only read the book but comprehend and retell the book as well.  They also need to describe the settings, characters, etc.  Expanding these skills each night, at home, will help develop this important skill.

ELA - We are so excited to see the progress our small groups are making in ELA and Writing.  We have the students broken down into multiple small groups depending on the skill we are emphasizing.  If the students are not working in a small group, they are having fun with their friends in our stations.  We have added new stations this past week.  We are working on strengthening the kiddos hands to increase his or her stamina in writing.  We have a fun clothes pin activity and also a pom pom pick up game.  The students found this to be a fun activity and didn't realize the skill we were trying to build!  We did see them occasionally rubbing their fingers and encouraged them to rotate!  These are fun activities that you can practice at home as well.  Any type of activity involving the squeezing (clothes pin to pick up things, tweezers, etc.).  Also, students can use playdough or modeling clay to make our sight words and letters.  The students initially can play with it to make it soft and pliable.  They can then mold it into letters and words.

Writing - Your students brought home his or her growth portfolio this week.  We were so excited to show you pieces of writing from the beginning of the year to current.  We are so proud of our students.  The kiddos started a new "small moment" writing segment this week.  We had lots of smiles as the students shared the moment with us.  They could read back their sentence or multiple sentences to us and also pointed to the illustrations giving us great verbal and picture details.  As you saw in the portfolios, it is not always easy for us adults to read the sentences!!  The important piece is that the student reads their words and completely understand what it says.  In the past, this has not been the case.  They would look at a bunch of letters all together and could not make sense of it.  If they forget, they look at their picture and can remember.

Math - In our small groups this week, our students completed his or her Unit 2 test.  We referred to this as a "show us what you know" paper.  Some of our students wanted to rush this process and not necessarily give us their best work.  We continue to encourage students to give us their very best and to take as much time as they need.  We have also started the task of explaining that each student works at a different pace and will finish at different times.  We talked about how each student takes a different amount of time to let things bounce around their brain to come up with the right answer.  In our small groups, our students had a fun activity where the student and teacher were asked the same question.  The teacher took a lot longer to come up with the answer but the student answered right away.  We then talked about how this happens with kiddos every day.  They still come up with the right answer but it just might take a little longer.  We think they just liked beating the teacher but hopefully the message hit home on some level!

Social Studies - We had fun with some Smartboard activities and also used some internet resources to help the students understand the difference between goods and services and how some start out as goods but end up being a service.  This seems to be a hard concept to grasp, so we took a little more time to help the students.  We are using multiple resources to help each student pick up on this concept.  Please feel free to point out goods and services while at home or out and about.  Real life situations seem to always nudge the concept farther.  We also discussed the trade process.

Spanish - We are moving right along in Spanish and are learning so much.  We hope the students are sharing his or her new vocabulary words with you.  We have asked Senora Nati to only speak Spanish with our students.  We are pleased to announce that we are completely immersed in Spanish for 30 minutes a day.  Ms. Robin still assists with the class during this time.  If the students feel any stress or anxiety about what is expected of them, Ms. Robin and Senora Nati use visual aids and motions to assist the students.  Guess what??  They get it and are loving it.  We are also happy to announce that Ms. Robin is learning Spanish too :).  You will now receive new vocabulary words every 2 weeks.  We want to introduce the words and work on them for 2 weeks, every day, to make sure the students not only are comfortable with the words but also begin using them daily.

encima - on top
lluvia - rain
arcoiris - rainbow
largo - long
corto - short
alto - tall
compana - bell
cuadrado - square
sentado (a) - sit down

WHAT TO LOOK FOR NEXT WEEK:

ELA- This week we will be focusing on blending and building words in our small groups.

Writing- Our writers will be working towards finishing editing their chosen piece, and writing the final draft!

Math- We will continue discussing and solving addition and subtraction story problems this week.  We will also practice seeing groups of tens in teen numbers and exploring partners in numbers 1-6 with pennies.

Social Studies- We are starting our fourth unit in Social Studies.  This week we will be discussing how to get along with others, what responsibility means, followed by making a class graph of things each of us are responsible for.