News From Our Classroom

    Hello, and welcome back from Christmas Break!   I hope your holidays were all you wished for, and that now everyone is ready to be back at school for a little while.  I am writing this blog on Wednesday because we have a "Snow Day" (rather, an "ice day", I think) and there are some things I wanted to share with you before the weekend.
      First, we have a new student in our classroom.  Peyton Isham was at Crescent Park for Kindergarten, and then moved to Massachusetts for a while.  She and her mom are back now, and we are very lucky to have Peyton as one of our classmates!  Welcome back, Peyton!
      The next thing I wanted to tell you is that I will not be in school this coming Friday--1/6.  No, I am not sick again--fortunately, the chest cold I had before Christmas (and couldn't get rid of) did go away during Christmas Break.  It must have been the extra rest!  Anyway, I am taking a personal day on Friday to be with my father (who is 87) as he "celebrates" the anniversary of his second wife's death.  During Christmas, he expressed anxiety about being alone "especially on THAT day", so I have taken a personal day to be there for him.  Sandy Cole will be my sub--she knows the kids, and they know her, so all should go well.   YES,  THERE WILL BE "SHARE TIME" THIS FRIDAY!!! HOW COULD WE NOT HAVE "SHARE TIME" RIGHT AFTER CHRISTMAS?!    I intend to be back at work on Monday morning.  I will do the "tests" on sight words and sentences upon my return on Monday, so your child has the weekend to practice his/her sight words or sentences, if needed.  New sight words, sentences, and little readers will NOT come home on 1/9 (since I will be doing evaluations during our typical reading time), but WILL come home on Tuesday, 1/10, instead.  These new words and sentences will then be assessed on Friday, January 20, since we will be starting to learn them a day late, and will have a Monday holiday (MLK Jr. Day) on the following week.  So, you will need to hang onto the words and sentences that come home on the 10th, and practice those for evaluation on the 20th.   I know this is a little confusing--the "secret" is NOT to get rid of sight word cards or sentences until you receive the next set--then you will know you have the "right" ones.  Hopefully, by 1/23 we will be back on schedule.
       Over the next few weeks, we will be working very hard in Math to get the idea of "place value" firmly set in our minds.  "Place value" means understanding what a digit "means" by where it is located in a number.  For example, in the number  75, the seven means "seven tens" (70) and the five means "five ones" (5),   while in the number 753  the seven means "seven hundreds" (700), the five means "five tens" (50), and the three means "three ones" (3).  As an adult, this understanding is second nature to you, but as a child it is difficult to understand how the same digit can mean different things depending on WHERE it is located.  So, your child will be spending a LOT of time building double-digit numbers in many different ways.  He or she will learn the meaning of the double digit number, will learn to "build" it using base ten blocks (or other materials grouped in "tens" and "ones),  and will learn to write these same numbers in "expanded notation".  In the example of 753 given above,  the expanded notation form of that number is  700 + 50 + 3.  It is also time that we work on time and money concepts, so we will be practicing those concepts, as well.  We have already reviewed how to read a clock that is showing time to the hour, and are working on making a clock show time to the hour, as well.  We will work on drawing that time on clocks on paper, too.  Then we will move on to half hours.   You can help at home with money.  Your child needs to know the names and values of each coin before we can work on adding coin values to a dollar.  Have her grab some coins from somewhere (your pocket, your purse, or out of a bowl on the table), sort the coins into "like" piles, and tell you the name and value of each coin.  If they manage those tasks well, then they can start working on adding the values of the coins.
      We will be studying the  remaining systems in the human body during the months of January and February.  This week, we reviewed what we had learned about the skeletal system:
1)  The adult human body consists of 206 bones
2)  The  main purposes of the skeleton are: to give the body its shape, to protect those important soft organs: the brain, the heart, the lungs, the liver, the kidneys and the stomach; to create new blood cells (inside the bone marrow)
3)  Several important bones are: the skull, the rib cage, the spine, the pelvis,  the femur (the longest bone in the body) and the bones of the ear (the smallest bones in the body).
Next week, we will be learning about the muscular system.

     I think that's all for this week.  I hope things go well on Friday.  Remember that I will be assessing sight words and fluency sentences on Monday.  The following Monday is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, so there will be no school on the 16th.  Have a good weekend!