January Newsletter

Greene Gazette

January 2016                             c.greene@hwschools.net

Happy New Year! Language Arts: Our literacy hour consists of time in our small groups for guided reading, working in stations including a science/sketching station, listening to books on cd and drawing a response to the story, magnetic trick word station, and working in our reading journals to create written responses to picture book read aloud to the children. Children continue to learn about and notice the features of fiction and nonfiction texts as we study a variety of topics. Bookmaking: The two-day workshop I atteneded with Martha Horn was a wonderful refresher on how to help children to bring bookmaking to the next level. We will be shifting our bookmaking focus to learn how to use our own words to tell our own stories which will become our books. Children have mostly been creating books that retell other books they have read, or nonfiction factual books, and also fictional stories showing their own creative nature. Learning to make books that tell our own stories will help the children create narrative stories. I will be modeling and guiding children through this process by sharing my own oral stories and turning them into books. This will also allow us to focus on how to create detailed drawings to support our stories. Fundations: Unit 6 Adding suffix “s” to a baseword. The children are adding suffix “s” to words with familiar spelling patterns and reviewing rules of digraphs, bonus letters, and glued sounds (am, an, all) to make words such as socks, chips, balls, pans, puffs.

Math: We have been working with place value and comparing two digit numbers in a variety of ways while also becoming more familiar with the patterns found on a 100 chart. We contiue with using our math journals for problem solving activities. The end of January we shift our focus to learning about clocks and telling time to the hour and half hour! We will be asking for examples of small clocks you have at home for our clock museum! Stay tunned.

Science: This month we will be growing paperwhite bulbs and of course talking and writing about what we see, what we notice, and what we are wondering about as we observe their growth in the comings weeks. This is a fun and interesting way to extend our planting study into the winter months and brighten our classroom with the beautiful tiny star like flowers! We will also focus on the winter weather we notice this month as we learn about words to describe outside temperatures and the types of precipitation we see. This is also a fun time to talk about how animals adapt to the winter months, where they live, and how they stay warm and find food. We have already had juncos and chickadees visit our new bird feeders right outside our windows! Mrs. Greene also found some great mini stamps of different animal tracks that we can study. Sincerely, Mrs. Greene