November 9, 2015

Dear Parent(s),

We had another fun and eventful week! Friday was our celebration of our How To Unit in Writing Workshop. We celebrated by acting out our partner’s How To with each other! What fun it was to watch hot dogs being made, pianos being played, pets being taken cared of plus so much more! After we finished sharing with our partners, it was time to make turkey cookies following a How To I wrote. Our learners followed the directions to make these delicious cookies and finally eat these yummy treats! I had many requests for the recipe to be able make at home, so I included it on the back of the newsletter. Enjoy making them and gobbling them up with your author!

As readers, we began our unit into nonfiction reading. This week our readers will learn that chatting with our partner helps us learn more about our nonfiction topics. We’ll also practice rereading our nonfiction books to make our reading sound smoother and smoother. We’ll also work on making our reading sound livelier by stressing important parts. We’ll finish out the week by shopping for new nonfiction books to read and discover more about our world.

As writers, we’ll begin our new writing unit in All About books. Since we wrote All About books in kindergarten, this unit of writing will not be entirely new but we’ll be able to dig deeper in nonfiction writing. After exploring all kinds of All About books and their features on Monday, we’ll choose a topic to write about on Tuesday and begin! We’ll keep our readers in mind as we write our All About books. We’ll also work on using our pictures to teach our readers all we know.

As mathematicians, we’ll continue to explore numbers to 100. We’ll compare numbers by not only using the words greater than, less than and equal to but also use the symbols <, > and =. We’ll then explore different ways we can represent one number by making the number with different combinations of tens and ones. We’ll finish up the week by playing a fun game with our 100’s chart demonstrating what we know about numbers to 100. We’ll have a test on Friday on place value and comparison of numbers to 100. We are mathematicians!

As social scientists, we learned and discussed about the rules we have in our school community. We also discussed what it might be like without rules. We had a fun time imagining this, but decided we have our rules to keep us safe and keep us happy. We then began discussing our leaders that help decide our rules. We also began looking at how we choose our leaders. To learn more about the election process, we’re working on an election of our very own. Our citizens decided to have an election between Arthur and Buster. So this week our citizens will break into groups creating and running the campaigns by making buttons, posters and creating speeches. Stay tuned for who will win for our president…Arthur or Buster!

A big thank you to Jet, Jennings and Joseph for contributing to our acorn collection…we won second place! Enjoy your week with your learner!

Appreciatively, Gail Behrendt

Our Related Arts Schedule:

Monday (12:50-1:40) – Music

Tuesday (7:55-8:45) –Media Center

Wednesday (9:55-10:55) – P.E.

Thursday (7:55-8:45) – Computer Lab

Friday (8:50-9:40) – Music

Lunch – 10:55-11:20

Recess – 11:25

Special Events

November 5 – Parent Conferences

November 11 – Early Release Day – 11:30

November 28 – Kya’s Birthday

November 30 – Brianna’s Birthday

Turkey Cookies

Things you need: Cookies (ginger snaps, sugar cookies or chocolate cookies), vanilla frosting, red hots, chocolate chips, miniature peanut butter cups or Rolos, candy corn or M & M’s

Spread the vanilla frosting on the cookie. Place the peanut butter cup or Rolo on the cookie towards the bottom of the cookie. Put frosting on the top of the peanut butter cup or Rolo. Place the chocolate chip on the frosting like the beak of the turkey. Place the red hot below it. Place the candy corn or M & M’s on the frosting of the cookie to make the turkey’s feathers. Gobble up your turkey! Yum! Yum!