Groundhog Day (almost)

Upcoming Dates
* Monday, February 4th: 100th Day of School
We will be doing an all-day first grade circuit on fun activities to celebrate the 100th day of school! Therefore, we will not be going to our computer lab in the afternoon (volunteers do not need to come that afternoon! Thanks!!)

* Thursday, February 7th: Cupertino Public Library Field Trip
We will be walking to the Public library in the afternoon. The librarians will read us some stories and we will check out 2 books. Please remember to bring your blue library cards and memorize your 4-digit PIN number! You can return these books on your own when you finish reading them. Please do not bring them back to Eaton.

* Thursday, February 14th: Valentine’s Day
We will be celebrating Valentine’s Day in the afternoon by doing some crafts, having a snack, and exchanging cards. Every child must prepare Valentine cards for every student and bring them to school on Valentine’s Day. They can be homemade or store-bought cards. Here is a list of all the students' names in our class. Please have your child write: To: (student name) and From: (your child’s name) on each envelope.
Aiko Amit Anna Brian Chris David
Hyunseok Jason Jeffery Justin Kelly Kevin
Kevin L. Kota Michael Nadiya Nasrin Ruth Saketh Yuna Yusuke (21 total students)

* Monday, February 18th – Friday, February 22nd: Winter Recess
There will be no school this week. Have a great vacation!

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Dear Families,

Although it has been cloudy each day, we were happy that it didn’t rain too much during the week. Most of the days we went out to play at recess and lunch. However, last weekend was rainy rainy rainy! We left our rain gauges outside over the weekend and we measured about 3-4 inches of rain! We recorded these results in our weather book.

Here are some highlights from the week:
Star of the Week: Kevin
Poem of the Week: January Thaw
Song of the Week: Money
Kindness is … taking care of the classroom
Story of the Week: I Like the Rain
Vocabulary of the Week: House 3
Word Wall: could, house, how, over, own, world
Next Week’s Sharing: Regular: something you made using 100 items
(at least 4 sentences memorized and bring object/picture)

• Language Arts: Theme 5: Home Sweet Home – Week 2
• Stories: Me On The Map
• Strategy and Skill Focus: Summarize
• Word Families: -ate, -ake
• Sounds: long a, final –nd, -ng, -nk
• Grammar: Which Kind of Sentence?

• Math: We finished our chapter on money this week. The Money song we have learned will hopefully be helpful to remember the coins and their values. We spent time solving money word problems together as a class and reviewed counting coins. Next week we are starting a new chapter on geometry, fractions, and probability.

• Science: On Tuesday, we went to Mrs. Tambe’s class for circuits and learned about the water cycle again. On Thursday we used real thermometers and did an experiment on hot, cold, and mixed water. We have been recording the weather and temperature everyday and will be finishing up our science unit in the next 2 weeks.

• Social Studies: We started reading some stories on penguins. We learned a little about the Emperor penguins and their lives in Antarctica. We made a mini-book about them and found out where penguins live in the world map.

• Writing: We are beginning our first narrative writing project. A narrative writing piece means a story (can be fiction), whereas an expository writing piece mean a report (non-fiction usually). We started planning out our own adaptation of The Mitten and began our rough draft. Next week we will continue editing and working on our stories.

• Computer: We illustrated our kindness pictures for the month of January during computer lab. We used KidPix to draw the pictures, and you can see our updated Kindness journals on kindness.pbwiki.com .

• Assembly: Today we had an assembly called “The Living Earth” from the Wildlife Associates. We had a chance to learn about real life animals and see them in person!

If you didn’t turn in your January Book It reading log today, please return it on Monday! A new February reading log is in today’s Friday folder. Please remind your children to follow school rules and be kind friends to one another each day. I have been giving reminders frequently throughout the day for children to treat each other respectfully and to focus on their work.
Thank you.