Monday, Oct. 10th

Our butterflies have metamorphosed!! We now have 6 butterflies in our room :)  We fed them sugar water this morning and are hoping that 2 little ones are able to open their wings a bit better by tomorrow.

We also did a short short short lesson on Christopher Columbus today and read some poems about his contribution to American history.  Will continue learning more about him tomorrow as we ran out of time today to finish our discussions and activities :)

**On Friday 2 items came home in the orange folder that need to be returned to school. First, a field trip permission slip. Please fill it out and return it.  I am also in need of drivers for this trip.  All children age 7 or younger MUST have a booster seat for this trip.  Secondly, a halloween party flier came home.  Robyn's mom is coordinating all the snacks for our party and has made a list of items we will be needing.  Please return the note if you are able to donate something.  Shelby's mom is going to be organizing a game for us to play at the party :)  

Thursday, Oct. 6th

Today we observed our mealworms (and our butterflies who are STILL in their cocoons...this is quite a surprise to me and I am hoping that we get some butterflies soon or I might be having to go catch some outside one evening to stick in there if you know what I mean...)

We also read the book Alexanders Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day and did some text-to-self connections.  We will be making a class book next week based on this book :)

We did some new centers today and I had a few (one in particular) excited students who loved working with the new centers materials (counting by a certain number, adding 10, base ten blocks, ect.)

Cassady said "can I have my picture? I've been working soooooo hard on this!"
Of course you can!

and now everyone wanted to be in the picture once they saw the camera come out! :)

And in math we worked with spring scales and balances to determine how many pounds or ounces something weighed.  We used the balances to compare items.

Tomorrow I will not be at school :(  Please call the office if you need anything as I will not have email access and don't want to let any important messages get lost.
Thank you!!
Have a super weekend :)

Wednesday, Oct. 5th

Today in class we talked about leaving people out and read a book about a girl who learns a lesson about including others. We practiced making self-to-text connections and used sticky notes to write out our thughts and stick them on to the page that we were reading when we made the connection.
In writing we continued to work on our Insect ABC books. We are stuck on O right now. Anyone know an insect or insect word that starts with o??
In math we worked on fact families and the relation between + and - problems. We also did subtraction story problems and wrote our own story problems to share and solve with the class.

we saved Game Day until the end of the day and the kids LOVED it! They did a great job sharing their games. Thank you to those who sent in a game :)

Tuesday, Oct. 4th

**I added a new tab on the blog!! Look above to see that tab titled "Calendar" This has the current calendar with the ABCD Days and the school-wide events on it. Hopefully this helps you keep everything in order :)

Today in reading groups (your child might not be in my reading group! Ask them to see who their reading teacher is!) we talked about how vowels are the "glue" that hold all letters together. All words have vowels. We need to make sure all our word in writing always include vowels. We also worked on the EN v. AN sounds.

In writing we all worked on retelling a story. This is the first step in learning how to summarize a story. We also worked more on capital letters. The kids seem to know where capital letters belong (and where they dont belong) but are not using this information when doing their daily writing. It is imporant that they always reread their work to make sure it is correct. We are working on this!

**Walk to school Day is TOMORROW!
**Game day is TOMORROW!

Monday, Oct. 3rd

*******Please email me or write me a note if your child is NOT allowed to come to the halloween party and/or do halloween songs at music, go to the haunted gym on gym day, read halloween stories at library, or make crafts for halloween at art. Thanks!!

Walk to school day is this Wednesday. We are meeting at the Harper Woods City hall and walking all together :)

The first PBS reward day is also Wednesday. We will be playing board games in the classroom. I do not have a lot of board games so I am asking students to bring a favorite game to the classroom that day. We will be playing from 2:40-3:10. All children who have been on green this past month will be able to play!!

Today in class we had our first day of reading group :) Ask your chld how it went for them.
In math we did more mental math and then did math centers. We also worked on writing math story problems. Ask your child what they decided to write into their story problem (some of them were so creative!)