Friday, February 2nd

 Friday, February 2nd - Happy Friday!!

Happy Friday Weckie Families! What a wild winter season we had in January... and so many days off from school. Yikes!

We have continued to work hard and pick right up where we have left off after each little mini-break! We have been busy working hard and learning lots!

**IMPORTANT UPCOMING DATES** There's a lot upcoming, so I want to put this FIRST in our blog post for today:

1. Wednesday, February 7th - Global Day of Play - Dublin Elementary is participating once more in this fun World Wide event to get kids PLAYING together. We are going to celebrate in the afternoon of the 7th and ask that your children bring TWO toys from home that do not need electricity, batteries, have screens, etc.. Think board games, Barbies, puzzles, etc.. Please make sure that everything is labeled with your child's name so that everything that comes in makes it back home safely. Please make sure your child's toys are "school appropriate".

2. Friday, February 9th - 100th Day of School - This is the day where we want your children dressed as their best senior citizen self day! Please remember we also need a BINGO prize from each child to contribute to our big BINGO game that day. Prizes should be small and no more than $1 in value. If you are not able to provide a prize, please let me know ASAP so we can plan accordingly for ALL.

3. Tuesday, February 13th - Valentine's Boxes and Valentine's cards DUE into school! Please send your box creations and Valentine cards in on the 13th so that we can get everything ready for the BIG day on the 14th! If you need another copy of the class list, please let me know ASAP!! The list was on the back of the original "Valentine's Box" note.

4. Wednesday, February 14th - Class Valentine's Day Party! We will be celebrating the 14th with a craft, a movie and an ice cream sundae bar! We are still in need of donations for our Sign-Up Genius. We are not in need of any parent volunteers at this point. Mrs. Wolfe and Mrs. Chenoweth are our V-Day party planners and they'll be on hand to help scoop ice cream. 

Click here for the Valentine's Sign Up

5. NO SCHOOL - February 19-23 for Mid-Winter Break

Now, have you wondered what we've been up to academically? :-)

Phonics:

In Phonics we have been learning how to break apart big words! We spent a great deal of time on a variety of strategies shown on the chart below. 

This is a great list to refer to at home with your Weckie as they have spent a lot of time practicing each of these strategies! Then we moved on to working with consonants that camouflage and blend in with other letters - combinations like: wr, kn and gn. You'll notice in words with "wr" you only hear the /r/ sound and in words with "kn" you hear the /n/ sound and words with "gn" you hear the /n/ sound. We then dug deeper into the two sounds that c and g can make. Ask your child to tell you about the soft c (cider)/ soft g (gem), and hard c (common)/hard g (garden). We will be digging deeper with those hard and soft sounds next week!

Readers' Workshop:

Our readers have been immersed in non-fiction reading for awhile now and are quite the expert readers of informational texts! We have stopped to talk about reading non-fiction for information and how non-fiction can differ from fiction because with a fiction story you have to read cover to cover whereas with non-fiction you can dip in and dip out for info. We have looked at non-fiction features like: Table of Contents, Glossary, Index, labeled diagrams, bold words, photographs, captions, how-to, maps, tables and graphs! Students have taken time to jot down new information that they have learned that they could teach their partner in workshop time!

We FINALLY completed all of the iReady Reading Diagnostic this week for all. Between snow days and illnesses, this took much longer than anticipated. Scores will be coming home next week and parents will be contacted if their child needs further reading intervention.

Writers' Workshop:

We are beginning to wrap up our non-fiction writing unit this week. We have quite the experts in our classroom on a variety of topics! Next week they'll be picking one of their writing pieces to take through the publishing process. Look for these to come home in a few weeks! I love to leave them in a basket in the classroom library once completed so that other kids can read their work, learn and enjoy!

Math Workshop:

We have been measuring EVERYTHING lately in math!! Our mathematicians have gotten quite good at measuring with centimeters and inches! They have been all over the classroom measuring all sorts of small, medium and large spaces/objects! It's fun to get them up and moving and see their excitement about measuring. We ended the week with Math Stations where they had practice with: fact triangles for subtraction, story problems with friendly 10s, measuring a crooked path, creating arrays and two STEM type activities with building involved. They LOVED learning to play a new game called "Buildzi"!