WEEK OF JANUARY 3-7, 2011

WELCOME BACK/HAPPY NEW YEAR

Monday, January 3rd will be a Day 2; we have Art class. This week we will be studying the consonant letter Kk as in kite and king. As a matter of fact, boys will get to be a "king for a day" later this week and will get to wear a crown and make commands. Boys-just remember that girls will get to be "queen for a day" when we study the letter Qq later this year. Show 'n Tell bags for Kk will be sent home on Monday and we will have show 'n tell on Friday.

Due to the long winter vacation, we will take extra time to review the reading word list #6 and students will be tested on Tuesday. However, we will send home Reading word list # 7 to practice for next week's assessment on Monday. The children are doing very well with these lists. Keep up the great work!

We will be reading "Whose Garden Is This?" this week (we did not get to it last week, due to holiday activities). We will review the vowel Ii and all of the high-frequency words. We will talk about realism versus fantasy. We will write about what kinds of things they would include in their own garden.

In Math we will explore geoboards (another topic, we did not get to before the holidays) and make shapes on them. We will work with graphs, shopping with pennies and identifying the ordinal position of an item. We will review making patterns with shapes. During our math meeting we will work with the calendar to discuss the beginning of the calendar year along with our usual questions about months, dates, days of the week, shapes and the number of days we have attended school to date (we are getting closer to the 100th day of school).

Children will be listening to a series of books about a funny pigeon and I hope to start reading aloud chapter books to our class (I usually start with "Junie B. Jones" books about a curious and active kindergarten girl).

Weather permitting we hope to visit our tree (located next to the NSHS lower-level parking lot). We would like to make some birdseed treats to hang on our tree and I'm hoping our reading buddies will walk with us to help us hang the treats this Friday.

Homework

Monday thru Thursday: complete half-sheet of reading/math homework. Also-study reading word list # 6 and after Tuesday, #7.