Announcements
School Newsletter: Check out all the updates, announcements, and a note of gratitude from Ms. Trena in this week's school newsletter. School Newsletter Link.Thanks for staying updated!
Adopt a Family: Would you like to help out a local family in need? Our incredible social worker, Ms. Allison, has set up a holiday adoption program, which I offered for our crew to adopt a family to provide gifts and show generosity. It is amazing what a difference these gifts make. Here is the information: Here is the sign-up Genius link where you will find information for your family. All items need to be accounted for and identified with their ID code (on a stickie). Please do NOT wrap gifts. Please pass these to Ms. Lauren by December 2nd. If you are interested to learn more about Ms. Allison's holiday adoption program, click here. The stories will touch your heart.
Ongoing Volunteer Opportunities:
-If you are interested in being a lunchroom volunteer please sign up for our time 11:10-11:30 on this lunchroom sign up.
-Here is a classroom volunteer sign-up for days and times to come in.
Calendar
11/21 -11/25 Thanksgiving Break. No School.
12/2 Community Reading from 8:30-9am.
12/7, 12/14 First Semester Parent Teacher Conferences- see link
12/12-12/16 Climbing- Link for Climbing Sign-Up
Crew Highlights
Learning Update:
-In writing, our crew has been working on adding more writing. One day, our focus was asking ourselves, "What else to I want to say about my topics?" Another day, students worked with a partner to get ideas. They practiced saying "Maybe you could..." This made for some incredible writing! I had our crew do a "best kindergarten writing sample" which I can share with you at conferences. Each month I collect a writing and letter formation sample, and it is exciting to see the growth!
-In reading, our unit is called Rules at Home and School. Our mini lessons have been focused on vocabulary, author's purpose, and identfying text importance. We read two different mentor texts (one nonfiction and one fiction) to compare and contrast the theme of why we have rules.
-In phonics, our letter of the week was Ff and the high frequency word is. We have been practicing sounding out words that are three letter, such as fit, fin, and fan. We clapped syllables to hear word parts. Also we work on the "an" family: if you know can, then you know fan, man, pan, ran, tan, and ran. At this time, your child should show mastery of the letters/sounds of m,a,s,t,n,i, f and the sight words am, I, can, see, like, we, the, go, she, & is.
-In math, we finished up Session 9 titled Sorting & Counting. Students practiced sorting objects by size, color, and feature (such as striped or spotted). They practiced with identifying groups in the their mathbooks and also with collections of classroom manipulatives. It was fun to challenge them to sort a collection a few different ways, which got them thinking past obvious size or color.
-In expedition, we have been learning about prairie dogs. We have been reading nonfiction books and writing a new fact in our Scientist Notebook each day. Samples facts that we have learned this week: prairie dogs are in the squirrel familiy, prairie dogs live in burrows, they are excellent diggers, the mound on top helps prevent water from going into their tunnels, they eat grass and plants, and badgers are one of their predators. Most relevant to our purposes, we learned that they always have one prairie dog watching for danger and will bark to alert the others. We connected this to mean that they work together as a crew to keep each other safe. And then we were able to see this on our Fieldwork!
