Week of Oct. 10-13

It's a short week with lots to do!  We're learning about pumpkins this week, as well as fire safety.  Stop, drop, and roll!  Homework went out today- please return by Thursday.  Thanks!  This week in:

Reading The focus is on /r/ sounds and words beginning with r.  We will continue to review /m/ and /s/.  During story time, our comprehension strategies are: using background knowledge to help us understand or make predictions in text; compare/contrast (we are doing this with real and pretend pumpkins in the media); and retelling events from a story and identifying characters and the setting.  When reading to your child, ask him/her to tell events that happened in the beginning, middle, and end.

Language Arts  This week we are drawing and writing about what a firefighter looks like to us, creating a list of fire safety words, brainstorming ideas for what to do in case of an emergency, and then writing about it in our journal.  The big focus for us is using phonetic spelling (sounding out words) and then putting the sounds to paper.  We will continue to work on capitalizing the first letter in a sentence, as well as our names, placing spaces between words, and adding punctuation to the end.  After our writing today, I've discovered that we have some AWESOME phonetic spellers!

Math  We've started a new topic- comparing groups with 0-5 objects.  Children will determine which group has "more" or "fewer" and "how many more" or "how many fewer."  An example I did today was hold 3 markers in one hand and 2 crayons in the other.  The class had to identify the group with more and the group with fewer items.  They understand "more," but fewer is a bit tricky.  They should be able to understand that fewer is less, it's the smaller group.  Around the house, gather up spoons vs. forks, pennies vs. nickels, crayons vs. markers and have your child circle or point to the group with more and then the group with fewer. Ask him/her how many more is one group and  how many fewer are in the other group.  I would not make a group of more than 5 objects for right now. 

Science  We are learning about the parts of a pumpkin plant, planting pumpkin seeds (which we will record our observations every week), observe the characteristics of real pumpkins and pumpkins in the media (talking, dancing, singing), make a prediction of how many seeds are in a pumpkin, then carve it and count seeds to see if our predictions are correct, and finally we'll have a pumpkin tasting and graph our favorite pumpkin food.  Mrs. Miller votes for ice cream. :)

Funny quote today- Mr. Smith, the music teacher, to the class:  Who was Christopher Columbus?  Student: He was a big giant. :)   Tomorrow, we will construct student choices of the Santa Maria, Pinta, or Nina.