Weekly Update

Dear Families,

The weather is getting cold outside.  Thank you for sending mittens, hats, boots and snow-pants with your child to school.  As you know, we have recess every day and it is important that we bundle up to stay warm now!  It is still a little muddy outside, so your child's snow-pants and boots easily get dirty outside.  I will remind the students to bring all of their snow-gear home this weekend.  I know many students have an extra set just for school, but since we still have mud outside, it might be a good idea to bring it home to be washed.

This week, we continued our solar system workshops on Team Harmony and the students rotated to a new workshop.  It is wonderful to see all of Harmony's students work and learn together.  They are so inquisitive and curious about space and our solar system.  Many children also chose these types of books to take home when we went to the library earlier this week.  I hope they share about all the new knowledge they are gaining in school. 

This week in reading, the students began partner reading.  We are very excited about partner reading because it gives us the opportunity to read new books together with just one other friend.  We have a special "Partner Reading Library" in our classroom filled with books for just 2 people.  They books are bundled together and we even have a special sign-out system for these books.  This week, the students learned to sign partner reading books out, return them and how to be a good reader with a friend.  we talked about what it looks like and sounds like when we partner read.  We also talked about how partners choose books together.  This can be challenging if you and your partner have different interests or preferences.  As a class, we came up with many different ideas for how we can resolve these issues.  For example, the students said that they can take turns choosing books, offer their friend to choose first, or even let the person whose name comes first in the alphabet choose first.  They did an amazing job.  In fact, we had a parent volunteering in our classroom during one of our partner reading blocks, and she noticed that all the students were so kind and polite to each other.  She also noticed that the students helped each other with different reading strategies when difficult words appeared in the text rather than simply saying the correct words to their partners.  WOW!  I am so proud of all of you!

This week in writing, the students continued working on their new small moment stories.  We started talking about the importance of adjectives, or describing words as we sometimes call them.  We started exploring the use of adjectives in many books so we can learn from already published authors.  For example, we read the book "Alexander and the horrible, terrible, no good, very bad day" by Judith Viorst.  The students will continue exploring the use of adjectives in their writing next week.

Have a great day tomorrow and a restful weekend,
Maria