Winter Learning Fun

Last Friday we read a book called "The Big Snow". We looked at photographs of snowflakes taken by Snowflake Bentley. We had a snowball fight with wadded up papers - we had written three things about ourselves on our paper. The snowball fight got the papers all mixed up. Now we are reading the 'snowball' papers one at a time and trying to guess who it belongs to. We also made cool 'supposedly' symmetrical snowflakes with Q-tips and glue. Monday morning we will find out how they turned out. You could come by and see them hanging from our classroom ceiling.

This week we will be learning about penguins as well as other Antarctic and Arctic animals.

Reading
Using books about penguins and other animals we will learn about the differences between fiction and non-fiction, we will learn about cause and effect and we will each complete a mini-book report.

Spelling
We will be learning to spell words with the long u sound. Some of these words use "ue", "ew", or u(consonant)e to create the long u sound. We will also learn the differences in spelling and meaning of: to, too, and two.

Math
We are firming up our understanding of even and odd numbers and counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s. For example if there were 5 students in a room how many eyes would there be? How many legs would there be? How many toes would there be? etc.

Vocabulary
We have read the book "A Bad Case of STRIPES" by David Shannon. The vocabulary words we are learning are:
contagious
distraction
remedies
vanished
altered
perplexed

Healthy Lifestyles
Last week and this week we have been studying healthy lifestyles. We have learned about diseases. There are two main types of diseases - communicable and non-communicable. We have learned about some of the diseases in each of these categories. We have also learned about disease prevention through hand washing, good hygiene, nutrition, and exercise. This week we will also learn about avoiding tobacco, drugs and alcohol and more about nutrition and the food guide pyramid.

It seems to me that a good keyword for this week is "Penguins". I love it that they look so proper and polite in their tuxedo suits and I am amazed at what they go through to bring new penguins into existence. Both parents go through extreme hardship to help the egg then the chick to survive . Thanks for all you are doing as parents to nurture your little chicks and help them survive and grow. I care deeply for each of my students. They are sweet, wonderful children. This last week was a difficult one in our classroom. Not all but many of the students were wired and hyper on many occasions. They seemed to be talking out and not paying attention a LOT more than usual. I would appreciate it if you would talk to your child about the need to focus and try extra hard to listen when I am giving instruction and to be in control as to appropriate levels of noise in the classroom. Thank you for your efforts to help in this way. - Mrs. Taylor