News from the Jungle

Remember, if you have not already sent your child’s library book back, please do so on Monday in order for them to check out a new book!

Upcoming Events

10/4 Picture Day

10/10 Skeleton Centers – Sign-up to volunteer through Sign-Up Genius (link posted on blog on 9/26)

10/11 Half Day – dismissal at 11:40am

10/16 Late Start – arrival at 9:35am. School starts 9:40am.

10/17 Scholastic Book Order Due

10/24 Pumpkins patch from PTA (Thank you PTA!)

• We will keep these pumpkins at school and will do a project with them the next day!

10/25 Pumpkin Planting!

10/31 PBIS Party – Yard Games/School Costume Parade/Class Halloween Party

Agenda for the Week

Reading & Writing: We continue practicing the routines and procedures of Daily 5. The children learned about our writer’s workshop and practiced using letter sounds to stretch out words! The children could write about anything and drew a picture to match their words.

This week we worked on the letters Cc and Xx, as well as the sounds these letters make. We learned how to write each letter and where each letter should be written on the line. The children learned that some letters stand on the line, some sit on the line, and some hang down below the line. We practice writing in a straight line without having any letters floating or crooked.

I have begun testing the children on their independent reading levels in order to prepare to work with children in small groups and to be able to send home books at each child’s individual reading level!

Please utilize RazKids, Readingeggs, and Mathseeds at home. These are all wonderful resources to progress your child’s skills. When your child first logs on to Readingeggs and Mathseeds, it will ask them to take an assessment. This assesses their skill set and places them at the lesson that is best suited for them. Some of your children may start on lesson one or some may start on lesson nine. I love these programs because they place the kids at their own learning level!

Math: This week we worked more on counting, counting on from any given number, one-to-one correspondence, and finding hidden partners. For example: this is like seeing a pair of 2 and another pair of 2 when looking at a tower of blocks that has four. The hidden partners is leading us into working with addition and number bonds. We began discussing number bonds and using a hand model to understand part-part-whole. We also used manipulatives for the children to have hands-on experience with making two groups of numbers, pushing the two groups together, and then counting all the cubes to find out “how many in all.” The children are doing well with this beginning concept of addition!

Science: This week we learned about apples. We learned about the parts of an apple, how apples grow, and why apples are good for us to eat. The children labeled the parts of an apple, practiced patterns in math with apple shapes, and made an apple craft!

Mrs. Beydoun will be bringing in different colored apples for the children to taste on Monday so we can do a taste testing and see if different colored apples taste different from each other! Thank you for the apples Mrs. Beydoun!

Social Studies: We continue to discuss school rules and how to be a good friend. We are focusing on identifying our feelings and using our words to express how we feel rather than using actions. We are fortunate to have the social worker pushing in to our room on Monday mornings to help us further our understanding of our feelings, identify them, and use them to express how we feel and what we want.

Housekeeping Items:

Snack Time

Please be sure to put the snack in a separate place from their lunch. Please show your child where you will put their snack each day in order to foster independence for them. Sometimes, when the snack is packed inside the lunchbox, the children try to eat their whole lunch at snack time. Please only send one snack with your child. Thank you for your assistance in separating your child’s snack and lunch.

Snacks should be healthy to provide the children with energy for their day. Please send a simple snack such as fruit, vegetables, cheese, and crackers. Please do not send candy as a snack. Juice and milk are not allowed in our classroom. Please do not send any kind of juice box or milk with your child for snack time. The children may have the juice or milk for lunch in the cafeteria.

Folders

Please make sure to empty the folder each night! It is very difficult and time consuming to locate homework or important notes when the folder is full of papers from the day before. Please be sure to send the folder to school each day. It is a big part of our arrival and dismissal routines and the folders help the children keep all of their papers organized