Weeks of February 10th and 17th

It was great to be able to meet with families over these last 2 weeks.  It's always nice to see everyone and be able to talk about the growth of each of your children so far this year. 

On Tuesday, February 11th we had Hands on Nature.  We learned about various animal tracks and how to identify them.  We learned that there are walker pattern which includes the animals; dog, cat, deer, moose, bobcat, fox and wolf.  There is the hopper pattern which includes the animals; rabbit, squirrel, and chipmunk.  There is the bounder pattern which is from an otter.  Lastly we learned about the waddler pattern which includes the animals; porcupine, bear, and skunk.  We saw a puppet show to teach about these patterns, sorted patterns by the size we thought an animal was, heard a story which traced the steps of several animals by their tracks and then got to go outside to find some animal tracks.  We were successful in our endeavor and located some tracks.  Check out our photo slide show from our adventure.

On Thursday, February 13th we participated in Vermont Writes Day along with the rest of the school.  Each student and adult chose a prompt and wrote for a 7 minute time frame.  The prompts we chose from were "I love you because....", "When I play in the snow, I like to....." and "You are about to crush a spider when something stops you.  Describe what happens.".  All of the writing has been posted around the school.  Come in and check it out.  

We finished Unit 8 in fundations on blends and digraph blends.  We spent some time this week talking about magic "e".  We will revisit this concept in a late unit of fundations.

Our non-fiction stories in writing are coming along great.  Students have been able to write various teaching books about things they know well.  They are drawing pictures with labels, working on their introductions and conclusions, writing table of contents and even making pages that show the steps to do something through words and pictures.  They are a lot of fun to read. 

In math we finished our unit on geometry and are now moving on to another penguin unit.  We are using what we know already about penguins to help us strengthen our strategies for solving addition and subtraction problems.  We will also be learning about 2 new penguins toward the end of this unit. 

On Thursday,February 20th we made bowler hats for our "Read Across America" celebration we will be having when we return from vacation.  This will be held on Wednesday, March 5th.  There will be a K/5 assembly along with guest readers from the school throughout the day.  We will be stressing the importance of reading with an emphasis on the Dr, Seuss books.  This is an event we have done for several years in the school now.  The theme this year is "Grab Your Hat & Read With The Cat".  Each classroom will be making a hat to wear that morning.  Check out the picture of our finished hats in the slide show. 

I hope everyone has a wonderful vacation.  Get lots of rest and have some wonderful family time.

Nancy