November 18 - November 22

I am just going to get right to it this week.

Here we go:

• The PTA pajama dance party (reward for reaching our fundraising school goal) will be this Friday, November 22 from 11:05-11:25.  This will be the time slot for K and 1st grades.  Students can wear their pajamas to school all day.  Thanks for helping us reach our school AND classroom goal.
• We have been having trouble with toys being brought to school.  Toys are not allowed at school with the exception of an occasional toy for show and tell on Friday (remember I like show and TEACH).  A note was sent home about this from Mrs. Carter and I . Please help your child remember this new rule.
• Next week on Tuesday, we will have our little Thanksgiving party from 1:00-2:00.  I will contact you if you volunteered to help. If you didn't volunteer at back to school night and would still like to help just send me a message and I can give you something to bring. I could also use an extra set of hands during the party if anyone can help that way.
• This week we will write about Pilgrims and make a Pilgrim to go with it.  Our turkeys from last week turned out great!  Did you know that only Tom turkeys say 'gobble gobble'?  We learned that and other facts about turkeys and my students wrote great sentences using that knowledge.
• In math this week we will finish our chapter on two-dimensional shapes.  Today we learned about halves and tomorrow we will learn about quarters/fourths.  We will then review and take a test on Friday.  Our interventions this week will be on basic addition and subtraction facts.  
• In reading we have learned all the vowel combinations in this unit and will be finishing that up this week too.  We just learned /aw/.  That's a hard one for first graders to use correctly in spelling (they can't differentiate between that and a short o sound, but it will come with time). We mostly want them to say that sound correctly when reading unknown words.  Today we read the fable The Fox and the Grapes and tomorrow we'll read about another fox in  The Fox and the Hen.  
• We have read three versions of Cinderella and today we compared and contrasted those stories using a Venn diagram.  We read the first of our next three stories, Tom Thumb.  We will read two more versions of that main story, one is Thumbelina and the other a story from Japan called Issun Boshi.   

I think that's it for this week--I am rushing because I have an appointment at 4:30 and it's almost that time!  If I forget anything I will send out a Remind.  Thanks for you incredible and consistent help at home.  This truly is a phenomenal class!

Happy Reading!

Mrs. Armstrong