Week of March 31st

Happy Friday Pandas!

General Updates:

1. Please check out the specials classes update here!

2. If you have already signed up to be a mystery guest, I would love to welcome you back to the classroom for a second time!

   1. This is a fifteen-minute time slot that you are able to sign up for to either be a mystery reader or to teach us about your beautiful cultures! Please note, there are only two adults over the age of 18 allowed into the building for this volunteer opportunity at a time.

   2. Some ideas of things you could share related to your culture (but are not limited to) are: photos (holidays, travels, clothing, etc), videos, music, games, stories, puppet show, art project, etc. You are also welcome to bring in any stories and read them to the class for enjoyment! If you are bringing in books, please bring 2-3 books to share during this time. Cultural connections are totally up to you and what you are comfortable with. We can't wait to welcome you into our classroom this year! If your work schedules are tight and the time slots available do not work for you, please reach out and we are able to plan this over Zoom or you are able to send a video in that we can share with the class!

Click Here For Mystery Guest Sign Up

This week in literacy...

• Phonics: The pandas were introduced to three new heart words: but, want, there. The pandas also continued to learn about digraphs. This week our focus was "sound buddies!" These are special letter blends that make unique sounds, like "bl" in block and "gr" in green. We focused on these blends to help the kids recognize how two letters can work together to create a new sound. They practiced saying words with these blends. We also learned about the "chunk" -all! We explored how words like ball, fall, and mall all share the same ending sound. By recognizing this chunk, we can easily read and spell more words with -all.

  • We also continued to identify short and long vowels in words.

    • Short Vowels

      • cat (short "a")

      • pen (short "e")

      • bit (short "i")

      • pot (short "o")

      • cup (short "u")

    • Long Vowels

      • cake (long "a")

      • feet (long "e")

      • bike (long "i")

      • note (long "o")

      • cute (long "u")

Sound Collection: /m/, /s/, /l/, /n/, /f/, /r/, /v/, /z/, /p/, /g/, /d/, /t/, /k/, /b/, /w/, /h/, /kw/, /j/, /y/, /ks/, /z/, /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, /u/,

Letter Collection: m, t, p, a, s, c, h, i, d, f, r, o, g, l, n, u, b, k, v, e, j, w, z, q, x, y

Heart Word Collection: the, in, my, a, is, for, I, am, here, and, at, go, it, like, be, to, can, not, you, are, do, will, did, too, with, me, all, was, no, so, say, now, have, said,

down, come, they, that, this, ate, our, who, where, what, must, we, he, she, but, want, there

• Reading: We continued reading Little Kids First Big Book of Weather. This week we focused on rainy weather. We explored all kinds of rainy weather facts and learned how different weather conditions can affect us in different ways! We focused on understanding cause and effect, like how a storm can cause flooding. We also worked on vocabulary by learning about synonyms (words that mean the same) and antonyms (words that mean the opposite), like "hot" and "cold."

• Writing: We have been working hard on expanding our sentences! We learned how to think about the who, what, and where of a sentence to make it more detailed and exciting. For example, instead of just saying "The dog runs," we added more “spicy” facts like “The big brown dog runs fast in the park.” We talked about who the sentence is about, what they are doing, and where it’s happening. Our goal is to make our writing more colorful and fun by adding extra details that help paint a picture! Ask your child to share one of their expanded sentences with you – they’re becoming sentence superstars!

This week in math...

• We had fun playing new games to help us understand composing and decomposing numbers! We learned how to break numbers apart and put them back together in different ways. For example, we explored different ways to make the number 5, like 2 + 3, 4 + 1, or even 5 + 0! We practiced this with the numbers 5, 6, 7, and 8, 9, and 10 thinking about how we can show each number in different ways.

  
  

Reminders

• Please label your child's snack daily and pack this separately from the lunchbox.

• Water bottles stay in the classroom, if you want your child to have a drink for lunch, please send a separate drink.

• If you would like your child to buy a drink at lunch, please make sure there is money in the account for the lunch card.

• Extra clothes and PE shoes should be labeled and stored in your child's cubby.

• Please see Mrs. Smith's Principal's Message for further information about Willow Grove: principal's message

  
  

Upcoming Dates

April 17th- Half Day @ 11:45 am

April 18th- No School

April 22nd- Early Release