Mrs. Melissa's Bunch

March 2nd-6th

March is reading Month so we will be doing a lot of reading and writing activities! We started the week by celebrating reading month and Dr. Suess’s day by reading about his books in our Scholastic weekly newsletter. Also, Howe is celebrating by having a door decorating contest that goes along with our favorite book from any country we choose. Our classroom book is called Frog in Love. It is a beautifully written about book about a frog who learns what it feels like to be in love, and has a fun adventure while learning about his new feelings! We then had a discussion and got to see what the Netherlands looks like, since our book was from there. In the weeks to come we will be swapping our book with another class’s favorite and learn about another country! For writing this week we wrote a sentence about the color purple, since we talked about colors while deciding on Yellow for our color of the Month. Also, the kids wrote a summary sentence about our Frog in Love story. Our letter of focus was Q for Quesadilla and Quail. The kids made a cute Quail letter craft! This months Math focus will be on measurement. This week we had a discussion about what measurement is, and what things we can measure, and how we can use things to measure. The kids tested out their measuring skills by cutting strips of paper, at different lengths. Then compared two strips and identified one as longer, and one as shorter. We also used our measuring skills while making shamrock shakes in honor of St. Patrick’s day! The kids favorite day this week was Thursday when we attended Life Town!

February is a fun month for the kids at school! We celebrated a lot of holidays, including Presidents Day, Ground Hog Day (Yaaayy Spring!!), Valentines Day <3, our 100th Day of School, and this year was a Leap Year! We had a couple of snow days resulting in us missing our Swimming Field Trip. Thankfully we are rescheduled to go April 14th, the Tuesday after our Spring Break. The kids loved our second trip to life town, they explored more things this time around, and some students were brave and touched a snake at the pet shop! When we weren’t out enjoying the community, or celebrating the various holiday’s with fun activities, we were working hard in the classroom. Our monthly focus for math was dealing with shapes. We focused on circles, squares, and triangles! We used play dough to create our shapes, we found items in our class that looked like our shapes, we created monsters with all our different shapes, and we matched the shapes! Our monthly focus for reading was identifying beginning, middle, and end events from a familiar story. The kids enjoyed the various books we read this month, especially Little Raindrops, Frog in Love, Sneezy the Snowman, and Snow Days! For our writing lessons we focused on using the letters L, M, N, & O. The kids found our letter craft to be fun and enjoyed making their choices and writing a sentence that matches our letter. Our science activities continued to be about the weather and what seasons we see them in. We crafted our own storm clouds and added lightening! We made rainbows, and suns! The kids crated storm clouds and played with shaving cream as a cloud sensory. I think the kids favorite part was when Ms. Dawn, and Ms. Emily joined our class to help us make rainbow foam, and play dough for our math shapes!

January was a busy month! We spent our days talking about the New Year, Fractions, our wonderful four seasons and the weather that comes along with them, we made sensory bottles, focused on the letter I, J, L, and M, and read our stories of the month Little Red Hen makes Pizza, Worm Weather, and Little Raindrop. We had fun hands on sensory friendly science activities that related to the weather. To finish off the month we went on our first trip to Life Town (https://www.lifetown.com/). The kids had so much fun exploring the pet shop, cafe, movie theater, and store!

Wow, December flew by in the blink of an eye! The kids were busy bees learning and engaging with lessons about snowmen, Christmas trees, snow, candy canes, butterflies, and the color green. Academics were related to these topics through math activities involving patterns and addition. The kids enjoyed our stories of the month, The Old Lady who Swallowed snow, snowmen at night, and Christmas. Along with December related adaptive stories and stories from Story-time Online. Our letters of focus during this month was F, H, K and J. We crated letter crafts and letter sentences all about things that begin with those letters! We had fun sensory activities where we made snow and played with festive toys. On the last day of December before Christmas break we had a wonderful day full of Christmas celebrations. The kids were in our school Christmas choir concert where we sang Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer, Drummer boy, and song about Santa! After lunch Santa and his elves visited our room and we enjoyed the rest of the day playing, making Christmas cookies, and having tasty treats!

I hope everyone has a joyful and healthy break!

Looking forward to seeing everyone in the New Year!

Year book order form is due by 11/12/19

Weekly Review

• This week we finished up our unit on the plant life cycle. The kids enjoyed our sensory filled sequencing activity as an assessment for the unit!
• Our focused story of the week was the old lady who swallowed some leaves, and many other fall things that created a scarecrow in the end when she sneezed. Some of the kids found this story very humorous especially when Mrs. Melissa had a big sneeze!
• Our letter of focus was “G for Gingerbread” The students had fun creating their own gingerbread men.
• We started our Math unit about Addition and Subtraction. This week we talked a lot about what addition is and how to do it. The kids rolled dice to help me determine the numbers for our addition sentences. Then as a class we wrote our numbers on the white board, drew some counters with our number and added them all together to get the sum. The kids had fun being at the front of the classroom and writing numbers on the big white board!

No School Tomorrow, It’s Election Day!

Review of the Week

• This week was a fun filled week filled with lots of fall talk and fun activities.
• Our book of focus this week was Spookley the Square Pumpkin! This story has a theme that focuses on not judging someone by the way they look. We talked about how everyone looks differently and how that just makes us unique. We made our own square pumpkin and wrote a descriptive sentence about our unique pumpkins! We also read Pete the Cat and the Five little Pumpkins on Halloween and made a picture of our own 5 little pumpkins and Pete.
• We created some fun Frankenstein’s for a Halloween craft as a decoration for our room!
• We played a Math Game that reinforced our topic about numbers that are more and less. Each student got multiple turns to roll a dice to get a number. Then we looked at our number chart and found which number is less, and which number is more than, the number on our dice. We also counted with 1-1 correspondence while making a pumpkin!
• We spent a lot of time with our friend from Mrs. Kubert’s Class. They came over at the beginning of the week to make pumpkin pie in a cup, and have some sensory fun with a pumpkin.
• On Halloween we got to go Trick-Or-Treating and visited some of our friends in the High School program. We also had a party where we pinned the nose on a pumpkin, we hammered light sticks into a pumpkin, and tried to score some points by tossing bean bags into pumpkin buckets. Our friends from Mr. Jason’s class and Mrs. Kubert’s class came over to join in on the fun too!
• Our beans and grass has successfully started to sprout and grow! This week we moved our beans from the windows into cups and hope to have some bean plants pop up soon! As an addition to our pumpkin theme this week we talked about the life cycle of pumpkins and made a little book to go along with it.
• We reviewed our letter D and created a D is for Dinosaur craft.

Review of the Week

• We had a busy week filled with some very fun activities! Our book was Halloween themed, and one of my favorites. Room on the Broom by Julia Donaldson. Its a fun tale about a witch and her cat flying on a broom but nature happens and causes them to drop a couple things. When they stopped to find the missing items they encountered new animals and made new friends along the way. The kids have enjoyed making their own witch on the broom as a way to retell the story!
• Our letter this week was F for Fortune Cookie and Flamingo!
• This weeks Math topic was about More Than & Less Than sentences. We created some hungry crocodiles that only like to eat the bigger numbers!
• We are putting our finishing touches on our Science unit about the Plant Life cycle. This week we made a flower and lab