Happy Valentine's Day! :-)

If you weren't able to make it to our classroom yesterday, check out all of the festivities! From mailing our cards to snack to the party, it was one of the best day's of the year!

Slideshow made with Smilebox

Friday, February 11th

Happy Friday!! It’s been another wonderful week in 301!! The little Weckies sure are excited for their first Valentines’ Day at school! We have been working hard this week on our Valentines’ holders and if I might say, they are BEE-utiful!!

This week at Dublin was also spent celebrating the “Season of Non-violence”. In Kindergarten this meant we read a few books this week that dealt with kindness and bullies. We talked about being kind to people and treating our friends how we would want to be treated. We talked about how the words and action we use can hurt feelings. We read several good books including Audrey Penn’s Chester Raccoon and the Big Bad Bully and Pat Thomas’ Stop Picking on Me. We had a really great discussion about both of these books and will refer back to them as needed in our classroom.

Reader’s Workshop: This week in Workshop we focused on the “-am” chunk in words. We brainstormed a list of words with “-am” at the end and also read a short little-book that featured many of these words and many names with –am. Reading groups continued to meet as well. To help clarify, if your child is in groups 1, 2 or 3, your child will ONLY need their book-bag at school on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If your child is in groups 4 or 5, your child will ONLY need their book-bag at school on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Writer’s Workshop: An important part of writing is having an audience. Writers need to have a purpose when they sit down to compose a piece and our kids have been THRILLED at the newest component of our Writer’s Workshop. We have really been focusing on sharing our work. We’ve been talking about how we can set an example as an individual for the writers in our class with the work we do. We started a new story on Monday and were reminded that it needed a beginning, a middle and an ending. To help our writer’s along the way, they have been introduced to four new words: FIRST, NEXT, THEN and LAST. When planning a story, you need to tell what happens in a sequential order. To build our understanding of this we have been working on “pre-tellings”. This is where we have stopped and retold how we do something. We practiced pre-telling how we get ready for lunch and how we get ready for snack. As an added treat, we also practiced “How we eat a cookie” this afternoon! It is impressive to see what our kids have been up to in Writer’s Workshop!

I have included a slideshow here of the four writers who shared their work today with our class!

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Math: In math we have been focusing on graphing this week. Students have created a couple different graphs. We graphed the types of shoes we were wearing (buckles, laces, Velcro, etc.) and we also played a dice game where students graphed the number of rolls they made on a certain side of the dice.

Important Info:


Valentines’ Day Party – 1:45 Monday, February 14th


Snack Leader’s: Monday: Ben; Tuesday: Kasey; Wednesday: Matthew; Thursday: Kelsey; Friday: Narek

Friday, February 4th

Greetings from Room 301! It’s been a short, but fun-filled busy week for our kids. We celebrated Groundhog’s Day, the Chinese New Year and even had a special technology coach come and teach us how to use a new program in the Dublin computer lab!

Reader’s Workshop

This week in Workshop we have been working on building our sight word list. We’ve picked out words from book that we see often, added them to our classroom word wall and have been finding them in books we read. (We’ve even been making sure to use these words – spelled correctly – in our writing pieces). Guided Reading Groups met every day this week with an exception to Thursday. Thursday was a different day as we celebrated the Chinese New Year and had our time in the computer lab with Mrs. Getosian (Mrs. G.) our technology coach! Thank you for making sure guided reading book bags are being returned on time!

Writer’s Workshop

This week in Workshop we have had one motto, “When we write sentences we use lowercase letters in our words.” The kids have been striving to remember capital letters for the first letter of a sentence and then making sure the rest of the letters are lowercase. Our kids will be expected in first grade to write with lowercase letters. Why not start practicing now as we are getting better and better at writing our lowercase letters? We have also been talking about the three parts of a story (beginning, middle and end) and how we should include these parts in our writing.

Math

In math this week we have been back on a measuring and weighing series of lessons. The kids have been using standard and non-standard forms of measurements to measure items and distances in our classroom. We were introduced to tape measures and used these tools to measure different objects in our room. We also used our feet to measure and talked about how using my foot would give us a different number than a Kindergarten foot!

Social Studies

An important part of our Social Studies curriculum is introducing the kids to a variety of holidays. February 3^rd started the celebration of the Chinese New Year, the Year of the Rabbit. To celebrate we began the day on Thursday by making dragon masks. We talked about how the masks can be used in parades to celebrate at festivals in China. Then we read a story about a rabbit (keeping with the theme of the year). Last we created paper lanterns to use to decorate for the holiday. Everyone also found a fun treat waiting for them in their folders to celebrate at home! :-)

Important Info

If you have not done so already, PLEASE make sure to send in your child’s Valentines’ box (one large cereal box) so that we can begin decorating them on Monday!

Snack Leaders: Monday: Nick; Tuesday: Carly; Wednesday: Ava; Thursday: Thomas; Friday: Lily

Have a fabulous weekend – Enjoy the snow! Mrs. Weckstein