December 3 - December 7

Welcome to cold December!  Remember to please send your children with warm attire on cold days.  I had several kids with very cold feet after lunch break.  Snow boots would be advisable on days with snow on the ground and warm socks and coats and possibly gloves for their little hands.

Here are this week's happenings:

• Today I sent home a Scholastic book order.  It will be due this Wednesday, December 5 so that you can get your orders before Christmas.  Coming from a first grade teacher, books are a nice addition to your child's Christmas list.  I can keep your orders for you if you want it as a surprise, just let me know and we can arrange a secret pickup.  This month if you order online you can get a free book up to $5.00 with your order.  
• Tomorrow I will send home notes about a "secret gift" that we'll be making in class and making Gingerbread Houses.  It will ask for donations and help with these two December activities.  Watch for that to come home.
• The November reading calendars are due.  I will give students until this Thursday, December 6 to turn it in for a certificate, treat and pizza coupon.  After that date, they will still receive credit but not receive the added incentives. 
• I hope that you all  saw the fluency notes and power school grades that I sent home last week.  I was serious when I mentioned that I would be happy to meet with you in person about your child's fluency rate and ways that you can help at home.  Send me an e-mail if you would like to meet and we can arrange a time.  If I sent home nonsense words with your child, you can practice those during your 10 minutes of nightly reading. Our DIBELS test time is next week, on Tuesday, December 11.
• Our next PTA reading awards will be on Thursday, December 13 at 3:00 in our classroom.  The PTA will send home little slips of paper to let you know if your child will be receiving an award that day.  Those will be sent home next week.
• As far as our curriculum, in reading today we started into a new unit.  This unit we will be diving into "r" controlled vowels like /er/, /or/, /ar/.  We will also be learning about the past tense endings for verbs (ex. jump vs. jumped or smile vs. smiled or skate vs. skated).  Students will learn how to add the 'ed' ending verbs when in the past tense.  We will also start a new reader called "Green Fern Zoo".  This time we will be reading non-fiction text about various animals as we travel with Vern through the Green Fern Zoo.  We will not have spelling words again this week. 
• In math we will finish up our unit on two-dimensional shapes this week.  We will have our unit test this Friday.  Today we learned about equal and unequal parts or shares.  Tomorrow and the following day we will learn about halves and fourths or quarters.  We will then review on Thursday for our test on Friday.  Next week we will start our unit on three-dimensional shapes.  During our math intervention Wednesday, this week we will extend our knowledge of "making a ten" and then using that knowledge when adding three numbers together.  
• During the month of December we will be learning lots of facts about reindeer and doing art and writing activities based on these learned facts.  We will also read different versions of the Gingerbread Man--we will compare and contrast these stories and write about our favorite version.  Students will be reminded of the basic story elements in all fiction stories (setting, characters, plot (including conflict and resolution).  These next 2 1/2 weeks will go by very quickly. 

Happy Reading!
Mrs. Armstrong