Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

This week we learned about Martin Luther King Jr. with our Let's Find Out magazine.  We read about him and then made connections by creating our own dreams for the world.  The students wrote about their dream and attached them to their Martin Luther King Junior portraits.

In Readers Workshop, we have been learning how letters help us to read.  These strategies help us to figure out new words.  When you are reading with your child, you can model how to do this by pretending you are stuck on a word.  Then think aloud about how you are going to figure out the work.  We always reread the sentence after to make it sound smooth.

In Math, we are continuing to work on comparing numbers.  Students have gotten very good at deciding which is greater than or less than with objects and pictures.  Now we are trying with numerals.

Some of the books we have read this week are:

  .

Happy New Year!

Happy 2015!  We have had an exciting week back.  We wrote New Year's Resolutions after reading the book Squirrel's New Year's Resolution.  We have been reviewing letters and their sounds and how to blend them together.  We are getting pretty good at writing the sounds we hear at the beginning and end of words.  The vowels are tricky, but we will keep practicing.

We are continuing to compare with numbers and measurement.  We ordered circles from biggest to smallest to create an aerial snowman.  Then we compared the lengths of our last names.  We are also practicing writing and identifying numbers to 20.

In Readers Workshop, we are learning how to do a picture walk.  We look at the title and cover to think about what the book will be like.  Then we look through the pages and tell the story.  Good readers do this to "rev up their brains."  It will help us use context clues as we are reading.

Look for your child's progress report in their folder on Friday.  I have also sent home the assessments I did this week so you can see what your child knows and is working on.  I will be administering the Reading Benchmark over the next couple of weeks.  I will send home their reading levels once I have finished.  

Some of the books we have read this week are: