Ask Me About Monday, January 8, and Tuesday January 9, 2018

We've squeezed a lot of learning into the past two partial days of school!  Let's hope that we don't have anymore interruptions to our school calendar!
We read a poem and worked with the short o sound.  We thought of words that ended or had the sound /op/ in them.  The kids did a great job of coming up with a lot of words!
We listened to a story called The Colors of Us, by Karen Katz.  We identified the main idea of the story was that people come in all shades.  The book tells of friends and family in a neighborhood and compares the color of their skin to other things, such as cinnamon, butterscotch or ginger.  It made us very hungry!  It's a beautiful book that talks about diversity and celebrates the colors of all skin. 
I'm so excited at where the children are in their writing.  We have been working to be sure to do the things writers do to make it readable for others.  At this point, the children should be putting spaces between their words, spelling the word wall words we have introduced correctly, beginning to use upper case letters to begin their sentences, and are beginning to experiment with punctuation!  Punctuation is a tough one, but when given a sentence, they are doing better about remember to end it with a period, question mark or exclamation mark.  Today we reviewed adding details to their stories.  Right now, many of the students may retell and event and just go through what happened without adding details to tell their reader more.  We will be working more on the content of their writing now that they have a good start in the mechanics of writing. 
In math, we have been working with story problems.  Last week, we learned about identifying the important information, listening to find out what the problem is asking, and used a quick sketch to find the answer.  I am encouraging the children to arrange their sketches as a ten frame to help them see the relationship between the quantities, but the most important part now is that they use a sketch to solve the problem.  Yesterday we used a number line as well to solve joining together and taking apart story problems.  We will work with manipulatives as another way to solve a problem later in the week.  
We are also using 2 dice to play some games.  The children are learning to count on 1,2 or 3 to a number up to six, so we use a standard six dot die and a die with the numbers 1, 2 and 3 on them to practice this.  The Snowball Game has a game board that is a 120 chart, so they are also getting used to this grid.  This is another way they are getting a better understanding of number relationships.  This game is similar to Chutes and Ladders in that if you land in certain places, you can move ahead of many numbers.  In our game, if you land on a snowman, you can move ahead 10 spaces.  We know that the downstairs neighbor on the 120 chart is the same as counting on ten, or adding ten. 

No spoons under pillows or backward inside out jammies tonight!  We need a regular day!
Enjoy the evening!
Miss Wolfe