2008!

Upcoming Dates
* Thursday, January 17th: Book Orders Due
I will be including the January book orders in today’s newsletter. If you would like to purchase books, please write ONE check payable to Scholastic Book Clubs and return to me by next Thursday!

* Friday, January 18th: NO SCHOOL – Staff Learning Day
The teachers will be having a technology training in the morning and will be working on our writing plan for the rest of the year.

* Monday, January 21st: NO SCHOOL – Martin Luther King Jr. Day
We will be learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and his attempts for building peace in the world!

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Dear Families,

Happy New Year! I heard about some wonderful winter vacations in sharing this week! I hope your families had a nice time over the holidays. I went to Reno and Tahoe in the beginning of vacation and went snowboarding at Northstar. Afterwards, I celebrated Christmas Eve and Christmas with my family and my fiance’s family. It was nice having a few extra days of vacation after the New Year!

On Monday, we had a new student join our classroom! His name is Hyunseok Kim and he speaks Korean and English. He attended kindergarten in New York and they just moved to California last month. We interviewed Hyunseok as our Prince of the Day and learned about his favorite things. You can read about him on the Classwork section of our website!

Here are some highlights from the week:
Star of the Week: David
Poem of the Week: Winter Cheer
Song of the Week: Five Senses
Kindness is … making New Year resolutions.
Story of the Week: Snowballs
Vocabulary of the Week: Body Parts 7
Word Wall Words: friend, girl, know, play, read, she, sing, write
Next Week’s Sharing: Winter Poem (memorize words! No reading)
(at least 4 complete lines and bring object/picture)

• Language Arts: Theme 4 Family and Friends – Week 2
• Stories: The Best Pet
• Strategy and Skill Focus: Evaluate, Compare/Contrast
• Word Families: -ell and –est
• Phonemic Awareness: blending and segmenting
• Sounds: clusters with s, short e, silent letters kn, wr, gn
• Grammar: Telling Sentence

• Writing: We talked about what New Year resolutions mean. We tried to think of four different resolutions, or goals that we will try to do this year in 2008. We wrote them down and decorated a nice project to display each student’s 2008 resolutions. We will be typing these up in the next kindness journal entry.

• Math: We are finishing addition and subtraction to 12. This week we also started talking about pennies, nickels, and dimes. We will be counting money over the next few weeks.

• Science: We are starting our next big science unit on Weather! This week, we started observing the cloud cover, precipitation, wind, and temperature each day. We are recording the weather and temperature and learning how to create our own graphs. Also, we took a survey and found out that in our class, most students like cold weather! Specifically, most students like snow the best! We have been using our senses to observe the weather each day.

• Assembly: Today we had an assembly from Ranka’s Marionette Theater. They used puppets to tell animal stories. It was interesting!

• Computer Lab: Since we are starting weather, this week we made a rain scene. We used some of the drawing tools in KidPix to design our own umbrellas. Then we decorated the rest of the scene to show a rainy day.

• Music: We saw Mrs. Stauter this week! We sang several fun songs including Zip a Dee Doo Dah, The Hello Song, and One Dream. Remember that it is important to be singing and participating in music! First graders are starting to learn their songs for the end of the year musical!

• Art: Mrs. Blakeslee taught us about complementary colors today. We made a framed picture using different colors.

• Library: We went to the Cupertino Library on Thursday afternoon. Fortunately, it wasn’t raining! Remember to return Cupertino Library books on your own (please do not bring them back to Eaton!) Thanks!

• Buddies: Today we saw our fourth grade buddies! We did an activity about Abraham Lincoln and how they lived in log cabins!

Have a wonderful weekend!