September 23-27

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Tomorrow is the field trip to the Cumberland Fair!  Please remember to send your child to school with a packed lunch from home.  DO NOT SEND ANY MONEY!    We will not be buying anything on this educational field trip.  We will be going rain or shine, so please remember to help your child dress accordingly!

Thank you to all of the volunteers who would like to chaperone this field trip!  I’m looking forward to seeing all of you tomorrow!  Unfortunately, if you have not already contacted me about chaperoning (and gotten a response from me), we will not be able to take you on this field trip.  There will be other trips this year, so hopefully we will see you then!

Team Blowey has earned their very first classroom reward!  We have decided to have a pajama day!  Students will be allowed to wear their pajamas to school on WEDNESDAY, September 25!  Let me know if you have any questions!

PICTURE DAY IS ON THURSDAY!

Please remember to send along a healthy snack for you child every day!  Students are more than welcome to keep water bottles on their desk so that they can stay hydrated throughout the day, however, I ask that these water bottles contain water only!  Sodas and juices can leave some very sticky messes.  Thank you for helping Team Blowey stay healthy and our classroom stay clean!

Our Special Schedule:

Monday:  P.E.
Tuesday:  Music
Wednesday:  Art
Thursday:  Spanish
Friday:  Library

A newsletter giving you lots of details about Team Blowey should have gone home on Friday with your child.  If you have any questions or you need an extra newsletter, please let me know!

This Wednesday is an early release day!  Please plan accordingly!

This week in...

Phonics:  We are working with the short /o/, short /e/, and short /u/ sound this week.  Here are the words we are practicing:  fog, not, job, tell, went, pet, tug, hut, tub, and bun.

Vocabulary:  Here are our new words  share, wonderful, company, delighted, thinning, and enjoyed.  We figured out what these words mean and built connections to them.  Then, we listened for them in a short story called Making Muffins and a Friend by Vanessa Lavin.  

Comprehension:  This week our focus will be on analyzing story structure, especially the plot.  The story structure simply means the different parts of the story like the problem, solution, setting, characters, and plot.  When we talk about plot, we are talking about the different events that happened in the story.  Together and in small groups, we will work on piecing the beginning, middle, and end of a story together.  As a whole group, we will practice this skill while reading Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea by Cynthia Rylant.

Grammar:  This week, we’ll be focusing on commands and exclamations.  A command is a sentence that gives an order or tells someone to do something.  For all commands we will begin the sentence with a capital letter and end with a period.  An exclamation is a sentence that shows strong feeling.  For all exclamations, we will begin the sentence with a capital letter and end it with an exclamation point.

Writing:  This week, students will be showing me their very best writing in response to three different writing prompts.  This will give me a better idea of where students are in their writing so that I can give them more targeted goals during our individual writing conferences.  

Social Studies:  To go along with our field trip to the Cumberland Fair, we have been talking about “Now and Then”.  Today, we read a book called The Olden Days and explored how different life today is compared to life 150 years ago!  We’ll be searching for some of these differences when we go to the fair!

We also read a book called My Mouth is a Volcano! which takes a sympathetic look at blurting out in class!  It gave us a new perspective on what it is like for others if we are constantly blurting out our thoughts.  It also gave us a strategy to help us!  When we have a thought that just needs to come out, we bite down hard and breathe it out.  When it’s time for us to share our thoughts, we take a deep breath in, to get our thoughts back, and then we can share!

Math:  This week, we will continue our study of graphs.  Our focus will be on picture graphs.  Today, we created a picture graph to show our favorite kind of apples.  Then we analyzed the data by talking about what kind of apple was liked the most, what kind of apple was like the least, what kind of apple was like more than another type, and what kind of apple was liked less than another type.  We also talked about how many more one kind of apple might have had compared to another kind of apple, as well as how many fewer people might have liked one kind of apple than another.  We’ll continue to learn and practice a lot of the math fact games as well.  It’s a fun and exciting way for us to build lots of strategies to help us with our math facts!

Read Aloud:  Charlotte’s Web