Pumpkins

Poem: My Eyes Can See
Sight Words: up, my

Make sure you are practicing the sight words that are coming home. The ones your child should know at this time include:

• I
• a
• see
• the
• can
• we
• is
• at 
• to 
• me
• it
• look
• up
• my

Comprehension Strategy: This week we learned about characters. Characters are any person, animal, or thing that can think, act, or feel. We sorted pictures and explained what made each one a character. Throughout the week we practiced identifying characters within stories and drew our favorite character at Work on Writing.

Accuracy: This week we continued learning about letter names and sounds. We finished with the letters Xx, Yy, and Zz. Each day we read our letter book, made our circle map and met our Zoophonics character. We are now experts at letter names and sounds, and if we're not quite there that means we are still working at home and school!

At the end of the week we reviewed the letters and sounds with an apple chant followed by a student pulling an apple out of the basket. They had to name the letter and produce the sound. 

ABC BOOT CAMP Fashion Show: After finishing our ABC Boot Camp, we celebrated with our fashion show! Each student was given a vest made from a paper bag. A letter was glued to the back of the bag and students were then encouraged to make it as creative as they could by adding items or pictures of things that start with that letter and sound. We were models strutting down the runway and our friends clapped for us!

Vocabulary: This week we read the story, "The Biggest Pumpkin". In this story we learned 6 new words that were within the story. These words are hummed, gathered, discovered, fertilizer, contest, and admire.

iPads: This week we introduced ipads into our reading block. We practiced our letter accuracy by doing ABC Magic 4. This helped us get better at recognizing letters and matching the sound with the letter.

This week we continued learning how to write letters Xx, Yy, and Zz. Each day we continued working on fine motor skills and cut and colored our letter hat as well as other fine motor activities.

We have entered into a new month, which means new calendar journal! We are working on writing the day of the week and writing the date in numbers this month!

This week we worked on the skills sorting. Students will be able by the end of the unit to sort objects together by characteristic. We used Google slides to determine which picture did not belong if we were sorting. Later in the week students practiced sorting by shape, size, and color.

Vocabulary: This week our word was sort. Sort means to put things together that are the same.

Content: This week was all about pumpkins! We started the week by learning about the life cycle of a pumpkin and created the life cycle by gluing each phase on a string connected to a pumpkin cut out. Later in the week we talked about the parts of a pumpkin by creating our pumpkin craft. We even added the strands by gluing strings on the inside! We also visited Dull's Pumpkin Patch and learned more about pumpkins while also being able to pick one out to take home! We used our class pumpkin to investigate when we returned to school. We measured how many links around it was, how heavy it was, and how tall it was.

SEL (Social Emotional Learning): Social and emotional learning (SEL) is the process through which children and adults acquire and effectively apply the knowledge, attitudes, and skills necessary to understand and manage emotions, set and achieve positive goals, feel and show empathy for others, establish and maintain positive relationships, and make responsible decisions.

This week we took time learning about the 90 second rule and what resilience means. Check out each day's lesson! 

Monday: We sat and watched a 90 second timer to understand how long it was. 90 seconds is how long it takes for someone's emotional response to go through their body after a reaction to something in their environment. 

Tuesday: We talked about things that make us mad and what we can do in the 90 seconds that those emotions are running through our body. We used a google slide to show different examples of things that make us mad as well as ideas of what can calm us down. 

Wednesday: We learned what resilience means. We have learned how to be resilient through different experiences in our lives. Watch this video to learn more about what it means! 

Friday: We learned how we can reframe our thoughts by thinking something positive. For example; we may be nervous about something and scared, but instead of those thoughts overwhelming us we can think, I'm about to do something really brave. Sometimes that helps us move on and stop thinking the negative thoughts that make us stay in our amygdala. We also read the story "The Perfectly Messed Up Story". This was a great example of how we can reframe our thoughts. 

• October 11th-End of the First Quarter
• October 14-17th--Parent/Teacher Conferences
• October 18th-October 21st--Fall Break NO SCHOOL
• October 25th--Distinguished Breakfast @ 8AM
• October 31st/November 1st-Donuts with Dudes in the AM
• November 11th-Veteran's Day Program @ 10:00AM