January 23, 2009

Upcoming Dates

* Friday, January 30th: Snowmen Project Due
Please turn in your snowmen projects by Friday. Remember not to use any food!

* Monday, February 2nd: January Book-It Reading Logs Due
Please turn in your reading logs. I will be giving out the February reading logs.

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Dear Families,

This was a short week! On Tuesday, we watched the first 20 minutes of President Obama’s inauguration! We talked a little about our new president and now they should all at least be able to recognize his face! This week, we also had to say goodbye to Dodam because today was her last day. We will miss her and her family!

Here are some highlights from the week:
Star of the Week: Hadas & Matthew
Poem of the Week: Bear-ly Awake
Song of the Week: Money
Kindness is … building peace around me
Story of the Week: I am Freedom’s Child
Vocabulary of the Week: Body 1
Word Wall: grow, light, long, more, other, right, room, these
Next Week’s Sharing: Friendship Poem
(at least 4 sentences memorized and bring object/picture)

• Language Arts: Theme 5: Home Sweet Home – Week 1
• Stories: Moving Day
• Strategy and Skill Focus: Question, Compare/Contrast
• Word Families: -ash, -ush
• Sounds: digraphs sh, th, wh, ch, tch
• Grammar: Exclamations

• Writing: We are working on our “sloppy copy” Mitten stories. These are our rough drafts. We are learning about good transition words and how to add more details in our stories. We also learned about dialogue, and using quotation marks to show someone “talking.”

• Math: This week we continued learning about money. It is really important that your child has mastered skip counting by 5’s and 10’s. Please continue practicing counting and making different combinations using pennies, nickels, dimes, and this week we introduced quarters.

• Circuits: On Tuesday, we went to Mrs. Bachelor’s class for circuits. We talked about snowmen and made a winter scene using white and black crayons. Last week, we went to Mrs. Byers’ class and talked about snowflakes. We used raisins to design our snowflakes and then solved math problems using the raisins.

• Social Studies: We learned all about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. this week. We read many stories about his life and why he is famous today in America. We also made a project and learned a poem about his dream of one day everyone being kind to one another. Also, we learned about Kwanzaa and how they celebrate the winter holidays with a candle holder called a kinara, and a straw placemat called a mkeka.

• Science: We continued observing our grass, alfalfa, and wheat plants. They grew really tall this week! We even “mowed” our lawns by cutting them shorter and now we’re waiting for them to grow again.

• Art: On Thursday we saw Mrs. Abada. We made a neat garden sculpture using a Styrofoam base that we decorated using sharpies. Mrs. Abada gave us lots of sticks and materials to create our gardens.

• Music: We saw Miss Rachel on Thursday and she read us the story, “Follow the Drinking Gourd” and taught us some songs and dances to match the story. Also, we watched the second graders perform their musical this week! They sang songs about the seven continents and danced too! The first graders will also be performing a musical in May, so it is important that they are all participating in music class and learning the words of all the songs.

• Computer: To say goodbye to Dodam, we wrote her letters in Computer Lab and decorated them with different stamp designs. We printed these letters out and made a book for Dodam to keep.

• Buddies: This week we saw our buddies and made a neat Chinese New Year lantern using lots of red envelopes!

Hope you all have a wonderful weekend. I will be returning to school on Tuesday. Thank you for your thoughts, understanding, and kindness during this time.