Weekly Update, April 25 - 29

Hello Awesome Pre-Second Graders and Amazing Pre-Second Grade Families!


We have an exciting week in first grade this week with Funfest on Friday!  The kids are SO excited for Funfest!  Volunteers are still needed to help at Funfest. 

Funfest Parent Volunteer Info
Our class both is a castle/slide combo on the field.  The kids are so excited about our class both and this will be a lot of fun for them!  Parents are needed to help in 45 minute shifts.  Both paper and electronic sign ups went home today.  Thank you for your help with this!

 Upcoming Dates
* Book Fair: April 25 - 20.  The library is all set up and ready for the book fair!  It is open all day each day for shopping.  There is a special day on Thursday, April 28 when the book fair will be open at 7:30.  Happy reading!
* Funfest: Friday, April 29.  There are also 50th birthday celebrations all weekend.  There is more information about these events on the Harelson website. 
* Career Week: May 2 - 6.  All interested parents are invited to come in and share your career experience with the kids.  They love having visitors in class!  We still need several parents, so please let me know if you would like to come in.


This week in social studies and guided reading we are doing an author study on Eric Carle.  Each day we will read to learn about Eric Carle and then we will read a different book.  The kids really enjoyed this today!  Today we learned about visualization and I read "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" to the kids without showing the pictures so they had to visualize the story in their heads.  This helped them learn the importance of word choice.  Tomorrow we will read "The Very Clumsy Click Beetle" to learn how different elements (in addition to simply words and illustrations) can strengthen a story.  On Wednesday we will read "The Mixed Up Chameleon" to practice making text to self connections.  On Thursday we will read "The Grouchy Ladybug" to practice making text to text connections with the characters from "The Grouchy Ladybug."  On Friday we will read "Do You Want To Be My Friend?" to learn the power of images in stories.


This week in writing we are working on writing our first research paper!  The kids are writing about Eric Carle and each day they will add a paragraph to the paper.  This will give the kids great practice in note taking, paragraph writing and editing.  This is challenging, but I know that my pre-second graders are up to the challenge!  Kids - be sure to tell your parents about the steps for writing a research paper!

We received letters from our pen pals and today the kids wrote back to them.  They loved reading the letters and they had fun writing back.  They told their new friends all about our Eric Carle author study.  Kids - be sure to show the letter from your pen pal to your parents!

The kids came home with Rainbow Words and they are due tomorrow.  This week in making words we are reviewing words with the "ight" chunk.  We are also adding to our contraction study by reviewing "are" contractions and learning about "is" contractions (it's, that's, what's).  We will also work on using environmental resources to correctly spell words.

The kids enjoyed their Eric Carle centers today!  The centers for the week include:
1.  Listening - The kids watched a video of Eric Carle making his art.  They wrote three facts and their favorite part of the video.  They drew an Eric Carle - style picture on the back.
2.  Art - The kids used tissue paper and paint to practice making pictures the way that Eric Carle does.  They loved this!!!
3.  Writing - The kids wrote a friendly letter to Eric Carle.
4.  Math - The kids practiced place value and writing 3 and 4 digit numbers using number clues and riddles.
5.  Reading - The kids read a variety of Eric Carle's books.  They were surprised to know there are so many books!  They shared their favorites with their reading group.

The kids are really doing a nice job learning place value and writing large numbers.  We will continue to work on this during the week.  Making combinations of three numbers that add to six was very challenging for the kids; we will spend more time with this during the week.  We will also continue to work on automaticity in addition and subtraction math facts.

The kids enjoyed computers today.  If you'd like to see what we did, please click on the blog posting directly below this one, "Computers, 4/25."

Have an A+ week!
Mrs. Johnston