October 30, 2009

Upcoming Dates

* Next Week’s Sharing: Something that starts with the letter N

* Sunday, November 1st: Daylight Savings Time
Don’t forget to set your clocks back one hour!

* Monday, November 2nd: October Homework Due (if you haven’t already turned it in)
Remember to turn in your October Homework. The November monthly homework is in today’s daily folder.

* Sunday, November 8th: November Scholastic Books Due
Please try to order your books online. Our class earns free books with online purchases. Thank you!
1. Go to: www.scholastic.com/bookclubs
2. Class User Name: Beebear
3. Password: MrsYu (no spaces or periods)
4. Browse books and place order using your credit card (no need to send money to school)
5. About 2 weeks after I receive all the orders, your books will be delivered to school!

* Monday, November 9th: Turkey Feathers Due
On Monday, you will be receiving a large posterboard with a drawing of a large feather. Please read the directions that will be attached to the posterboard and decorate the feather as a family project. Please do not use any food! You may use any other types of material – try to be creative! We will combine all the feathers and attach them to our class turkey bulletin board for Thanksgiving! Please return them by Monday, November 9th. Thank you!

* Wednesday, November 11th: NO SCHOOL – Veterans Day
This is a strange day off in the middle of the week! Mark your calendars!

* Wednesday, November 25th to Friday, November 27th: NO SCHOOL
Have a wonderful five-day weekend to celebrate Thanksgiving. Gobble gobble!

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Dear Families,

Happy Halloween! This was a short week filled with lots of activities! On Monday, the teachers all gathered to go over the emergency procedures at Eaton. We talked about how to prepare for different types of emergencies, and how to make our current process even better. We also discussed Language Arts strengths and needs for each grade level.

This week, as a school we celebrated Red Ribbon Week. The theme was Healthy Choices. We talked about eating healthy and exercising to keep our bodies strong. Red Ribbon Week is about leading a drug-free life. For Kindergarteners, we talked mostly about making good choices.

Here are some highlights for the week:
• Language Arts:
o Star of the Week: Daniel
o Letter of the Week: B
o Story of the Week: Alice and Greta
o Phonemic Awareness: Blending and Segmenting Letters, Rhymes
o Strategy Focus: Evaluate, Predict, Infer
o Comprehension: Story Structure: Characters / Setting, Drawing Conclusions
o High-Frequency Word: my, like
o Concepts of Print: Capitalize First Word in Sentence, End Punctuation, Return Sweep

• Writing: We practiced writing our B vocabulary words and continued working on our handwriting. We have been getting better at writing a sentence about our favorite part in Listening Center. Remember to add spaces between your words and keep practicing sounding out words and letters!

• Science: This week we talked about Spiders. We learned that spiders have eight legs and compared how people are similar or different than spiders. We also made spider hats on Thursday and learned an Itsy Bitsy Spider poem.

• Math: We are working on writing our numbers from 0-5. We are counting and drawing different objects from 0-5. We are also reading graphs and using sorting to help us count different animals or pictures.

• Computer Lab: We continued our Pumpkin pictures from last week. This time we focused on drawing a background for our pumpkin. We remembered to use at least 5 colors, no white space, and we added details to the background.

• Music: Since it was picture day in the MP room, we had music in Room 8. Ms. Disney taught us a Halloween song and told us a Halloween story using variations of a Halloween song.

• Social Studies: For Red Ribbon week, we created a poster for the school about our Healthy Choices. Students got to pick eight different examples of how they stay healthy, and then illustrated these on a poster. The PTO gave each of the students’ a bookmark to celebrate Red Ribbon Week.

• Buddies: We saw our fourth grade buddies on Tuesday. Since it is Halloween, we completed a dice activity where we drew a monster depending on what number we rolled. Our monsters had different eyes, ears, noses, mouths, and shapes.

• Assembly: We had an assembly today by the Wildlife Associates. They brought real live animals – big and small – to our MP room. They taught us many facts about the lives of these different animals!

• Library: There was no library this week since we didn’t have school on Monday. Therefore, I did not send home the homework packet inside the envelope this week. If you haven’t yet, remember to return your library book on Monday so that you can check out another book! Also, in the future, please always keep your library book, journal, and homework packet together inside the envelope. This helps us to keep track of whose book is whose.

Today was our Halloween party and parade! We drew a self-portrait of ourselves in our Halloween costumes and then took a picture for our memory books. We also completed our 2009 Halloween photo frames with a class picture from last week’s pumpkin patch! We also had a treat to eat and some juice to drink. The classroom was decorated this week with pumpkins, bats, scarecrows, spiders, and spiderwebs! Have a safe time trick-or-treating tomorrow evening!