Notes from Ms. Rau:
- Holiday Celebration: Our Holiday Celebration will be on Friday, December 21st from 10-11am. This is a half day for students. Dismissal will be at 11:30.
- Oakland County Animal Shelter Service Project: This holiday season we would like to teach students the power of giving. We have collaborated with Oakland Animal Shelter to help provide their animals with some basic needs. We will collect and create items to help make the lives of homeless pets more comfortable as they await their forever homes. We know that there are many demands on your time and budget this time of the year, so please keep in mind that participation in this project is completely voluntary. You are welcome to consider a donation to the Animal Shelter instead of a class or teacher gift this year. We will collect the above donations until the class holiday party on December 21. You may donate the following items:
- Cat and dog toys
- Cat and dog treats
- Cat litter
- Kitten formula (dry milk that we use to bottle feed kittens)
- Bottles to feed the kittens
- Kindness Elf - We will have an elf in our classroom that will come visit us on 12/3. He will be our kindness elf. Each day our elf will be hiding in a new spot and will have a new random act of kindness for students to do.
- Snow Gear - Please send in snow gear in a separate bag. Large reusable bags work best. Students will be asked to take their boots off in the hallway so please make sure they are labeled and that you send in an extra pair of shoes for them to wear during the day. Please send me a note if you want your student to leave their snow gear in their locker instead of taking it home each day. If there is snow on the ground and your student does not have snow pants they will be asked to play on the black top during recess. If you are in need of snow gear, please let me know! Thank you!
- Classroom Donations - We are in need of some items for our classroom:
- page protectors
- prepackaged peanut free snack (i.e. golfish, animal crackers)
- white card stock
Important Dates:
- 12/21 - Holiday Celebration 10:00-11:00am
- 12/21 - Half Day for Students, Dismissal at 11:30
- 12/24 -1/4 - Winter Break, No School for Students
- 1/21 - MLK Day, No School for Students
Learning This week:
- Writers will...
- edit for spelling, capitalization, and puncuation
- add a table of contents
- create chapter titles
- plan and write chapters
- Readers will...
- act like TV reporters to teach their friends what they have learned in nonfiction books
- collect expert words
- stop and think at tricky words "what might this word mean?
- make predictions before turning the page
- ask, "how do these pages fit with the title and fit together?" and "what is this whole book mostly about?"
- Mathematicians will...
- be introduced to 10's groupings
- explore teen numbers
- create 10 sticks and 1's
- visualize teen number addition
- count on with teen numbers
- In social studies we will...
- discuss how family traditions change over time
- share our own holiday traditions
- learn about Los Pasados
- learn about Hanukkah
- In phonics we will...
- pay attention to common word endings (ing, es, s, ed, er)
- learn that ed makes three different sounds /d/, /t/, /id/
- learn that es makes two sounds
- learn about the tricky y
- learn that words can have ending blends
Photos from the week:
Sorting our reading workshop books into two piles: fiction and nonfiction
Sorting our reading workshop books into two piles: fiction and nonfiction
Matching words that have similar parts
Elfie reading with his friends
Playing math games, using the counting on strategy
Finding evidence for rules we learned in phonics in our reading workshop books
Doing a Santa directed drawing as a shared reading extension
