Weekly Update: September 25- October 1

Greetings!

Fall is here! It’s so nice to feel the cool fall air blowing on the playground, and to see the leaves starting to change colors. Please remember to send your children to school with their jackets as the weather grows chillier!


Thank you to everyone for sending in the signed field trip permission slips so promptly! We are ready and excited about our upcoming field trip on Wednesday to the Arlington Heights Historical Museum and Riviera Restaurant!  We are looking forward to seeing Mrs. Noble, Mrs. Giannopoulos, Mrs. Elliott, and Mrs. Papadia who will be joining us in our "field work!" Andrea, the owner of the Riv, will be coming in next Wednesday morning to follow up on our field trip, and talk to the children about owning a business in Arlington Heights!

Spelling

We worked this week on words that have the short and long /i/ sound.  Next week we will focus on words with the long and short /o/ sound! Why not search out words with these sounds over the weekend as a preview for the week? Keep a look out in any type of print you encounter... books, street signs, cereal boxes, the newspaper, etc., and make a list!

Grammar

The children practiced identifying the predicate in a sentence this week. We found it was really easy to find the predicate after first finding the subject of the sentence! We also learned that commas are placed in sentences to separate cities and states, as well as the date from the year!  We “acted” out the punctuation in our sentences by raising our arms for a capital letter, stomping for a period, jumping for an exclamation point, and wiggling for a comma as we read the sentences aloud. Ask your child to show you. :)

Reading

The common theme to our literacy activities this week was “Being Yourself.”  We kick off every new theme building our background knowledge by talking about the topic.  New oral vocabulary words include: remarkable, skill, amusement, entertain, and magnificent.  The children grew more comfortable with these words each day. It is so fascinating to watch them begin to incorporate these words into their vocabulary. Our whole group story this week was a photo essay about a little girl named Rosina, who is deaf.  We learned that even though she cannot hear, she is just like us in many ways! She learns the same things we do in school, plays the same sports, and enjoys arts and crafts like we do! She just happens to learn these things through sign language. Our comprehension strategy continued to focus on summarizing.  The children created webs displaying the main idea and details they pulled from the text.  New vocabulary words from this selection included: celebrate, cultures, deaf, language, relatives and signing.

Writing

Upon completion of the publishing of our autobiographies, the children and I had a Writer’s Celebration! Munching on animal crackers and sipping apple juice, the children viewed each other’s written work that was hanging on the walls of our classroom. They looked as though they were in an art gallery, taking in all of the interesting work of their peers. It was such a positive and uplifting experience! I could tell that the children truly see themselves as authors, and they were so complimentary of each other’s work. We are looking forward to jumping into our next writing unit focusing on the “Narrative” writing genre.

Social Studies

We have begun to talk about history, artifacts, and the past. Using their social studies text books, the children are practicing answering “right there,” questions. This can be a challenging skill! Once they are asked a question, they determine an important “key word” in the question and then skim the text to locate it. This was a great connection to a test taking strategy we learned in one of our reading lessons this week! The children also discussed the passing of time, and reviewed how a time line functions. Next week we will be talking about needs and wants, as well as going back in history to the very beginning of our town, Arlington Heights!

The children have also begun working to research a landmark in our town. Thank you to Mrs. Giannopoulos, Mrs. Elliott, Ms. Heintz, and Mr. Noble for assisting the children with their fact finding in the LMC on Friday. We will be creating artwork inspired by our research during the unit. We appreciate the parent support with this new twist to our unit! We've added a small "tour" of Arlington Heights to our ride home on the bus from our field trip on Wednesday, so we are able to pass many of the landmarks that the children are studying!

I found a cute song about Arlington Heights on You Tube. It shows many fun glimpses of our town. View it here:  Arlington Heights Song

Math

The children played a game this week called “Beat the Calculator.” Playing this game, the children realized that even though the calculator is a pretty quick way to solve math problems, it is no match for the brain when it comes to basic facts. The brain is always faster!  We continue to focus on the practice of our basic addition math facts. Many of the children are comfortable with their doubles facts. We've built upon our doubles facts by adding in the "doubles +1" and "doubles in between" strategies. We also reviewed the concept of a “turn around” fact, which the children recalled from last year (in addition, the addends can be switched back and forth.) The children also quickly picked up on the +9 trick. Our goal is to move away from counting on our fingers or the hundreds chart, and rely more on our mental strategies to solve these basic fact problems! 

Coming up:

We are looking ahead to a very full week next week! Tuesday is Picture Day, Wednesday is "Walk to School Day," and our trip to the Arlington Heights Historical Museum. On Thursday we will spend some time in the LMC working on our Landmark Projects! Remember there will be no school on Friday due to a School Improvement Day.

Enjoy the weekend!