January 2014

Happy New Year!  This is what is coming up in the month of January.

Literacy: We will continue to learn and practice new sight words (January words are do, come, in, and), read and discuss texts in guided reading, and write several sentences.  Duringe writing time, we have been focusing on conventions (leaving spaces between words, capital letter at the beginning of each sentence, punctuation).  In reader's workshop, we will be discussing traditional tales and doing an author study on Jan Brett.  In phonics, we have been reviewing letter formation, sentence writing, letter sounds, and sounding out simple words.

Math: We continue to review and practice writing numbers 0-20 and beyond, simple addition and subtraction, patterning, and sorting.  New concepts this month include symmetry, measurement, and 3D shapes.  We will also be writing our own surveys and collecting data within the classroom.

Science: We have started a unit on polar regions. There will be many opportunities to explore different animals, polar regions, snow, and temperature.  I can already sense the excitement from the class as they read through the many nonfiction books that we checked out from the library.

As always, please contact me with any questions.  I will post more pictures as the month goes on!

This picture shows our math journal activity. Each student had a cup with several math cubes.  They had to count the cubes, find a group of objects in the room that was equal, record the groups in their journal with a numeral and a picture, and then add the groups.

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This is a journal entry from our Jan Brett author study.  Today we compared her version of The Mitten with another author's.  A sky our child about the similarities and differences between the stories.

Math: symmetry       We painted mittens that had symmetry.

This was a fun game we played with partners.  One partner made a picture on one side of the ruler and the other had to copy it to make the picture symmetrical.

They enjoyed checking their pictures with a mirror to see if they were symmetrical.

Last Friday we were finally able to open our stockings from the candy cane exchange.  We had a blast playing several fun "minute to win it" activities.  We also broke open the piñata that the class made in Miss K's class when they learned about Las Posadas.  This is a picture of the candy cane mustaches that everyone got from Logan!