Week of February 6, 2012

Dear Parents,

Can you believe we have been in school for 100 days?  The children loved counting 100 goodies to make a trail mix for the 100 days of school.  The children also shared with their classmates their 100 items project. Each child described what they brought in and why they chose 100 of those items.  What a wonderful imagination your children have.

Here’s what we did:

Reading—This week we read Hide, Clyde by Russell Benfanti.  The story is about a chameleon and how it changes and why it changes. 

We reviewed the main idea of the story and introduced the following vocabulary words: chameleon, jungle, and pattern, and skin, hide, scampered.  Some facts the children have learned about chameleons include: A chameleon changes color when it is scared, angry, cold, hot, or when it is sick.  A chameleon is a reptile; it has scales or horny plates. 

We are listening for the short vowel /o/ in the initial and middle position of words.  We are also talking about speaking and writing in a complete sentence and what we need to make complete sentences; i.e. nouns and verbs are a must and adjectives “spice up” our sentences.  Please review rhyming words and the following high frequency words daily: the, little, I, am, to, a, he, is, my, have, for, like, me, with, she, see, that, do they, you, of, here, go, look, and we.

Math— We continue to work on skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s and recognizing and writing numbers 1-30. We solved math problems by performing probability experiments and making tally marks in a table to record data.  We ended our week by taking our end of chapter test.  We’re moving right along in all our subject areas.

Religion/Art—February is associated with love and tied in beautifully with our religion unit.  We discussed how Jesus wants us to love one another.  We talked about ways we show our parents, teachers, neighbors and friends we love them not only with material things but more importantly with our actions. Our heart people hanging from our lights make our room bright and “love”ly, they not only remind us of love but making them improved our fine motor skills; cutting, painting, and folding.