Wild Wednesday

Check off another busy day in room 111! Our kids have been working hard this week and we have learned SO many new things. Have your child tell you about the chicken eggs we welcomed to our classroom. We are beginning our new science unit on life cycles and will be hatching (cross your fingers) baby chicks.

Today we learned about different ways to end our sentences. We found out that we don't always have to use plain old periods when writing a sentence. We can spice up our writing with exclamation marks and question marks. Ask your child to show you the body actions that go along with each punctuation. They should also be able to tell you telling sentences (period), exciting sentences (exclamation) and asking sentences (questions).

We did a silly sentence today using the letter "O" and we learned a new "o" word. Check your child to see if they can tell you what "ornery" means.

In math we continue to tackle the tricky concept of SUBTRACTION! Check your child's understanding of subtraction by giving them a few different problems. To make it more interesting and meaningful, put your information into a story. For example:

"Ms. Beverage made 12 cookies last night and Charlie ate 4. How many cookies did she have left?"

We have worked a lot with having our brain alarms go off when we hear key words such as "left". Our brains should be telling us that we will need to take-away when we hear this word. Today we have food math and used Goldfish to work through subtraction problems. Continue this idea at home using items around your house such as noodles, popcorn, crackers, m and m's, etc. Food math is fun and offers great hands-on manipulatives for our learning.

In art we began discussing Native Americans and have created several projects to reflect Native American culture. We have used our knowledge of patterning to make paper-woven placements. Have your child tell you about their weaving project. Today we learned the word "SYMMETRY" and began creating our symmetrical Native American False Faces. Ask your child to tell you what symmetry means. They should be able to give you examples of symmetry and non-examples, as well! All of our Natvie American art projects will be on display or used for our grade-level Pumpkin Festival later in November. More information on that to come later...

Finally, I am so proud to announce that EVERY single one of the first graders in my room have handed in their first Power Drill homework assignment! Ya-hoo! They were not due until tomorrow (Thursday) morning and I have ALL of them in my pocession now! THANK YOU SO MUCH for helping your child complete this first homework assignment successfully. They have all earned their way to Power Half-Hour on Friday! Amazing!

Don't forget that tomorrow is a Library day so bring your books back! Have a great evening!