K-2's Weekly News (Sept. 17-21)

What a wonderfully busy week we have had in K-2!  With fall officially just one day away, many of our activities this week have been inspired by our current theme---Apples!!  

Math
This week in math, the students practiced identifying and completing picture patterns that followed our apple theme.  Understanding and being able to recognize patterns is an important mathematical skill that the students will frequently use when learning new math concepts down the road, so this is a skill we will continue to reinforce throughout the year.  This week we also read the story Apples, Apples, Apples and talked about the different varieties of apples you can pick off the trees and buy at the store.  Then we created our own class graph to show our favorite kind of apples.

Jolly Phonics
The students continue to do a great job with their Jolly Phonics notebooks, and they love sharing their favorite picture for each sound!  Thank you again for all your support reviewing the sounds and helping your child listen for the sounds when writing their labels.  Your support truly makes a difference!  This week we introduced the following sounds:

Cc as in "cat"
Kk as in "kite"
ck as in "black"
Ee as in "elephant"
Hh as in "hot"

Writer's Workshop
The students are doing a great job practicing the routine of our Writer's Workshop---Think, Draw, Label and Write.  The work we are doing learning our Jolly Phonics sounds really comes into play during Writer's Workshop.  I am encouraging the students to listen for and stretch out the sounds they hear when writing both their labels and their ideas.  They are becoming more comfortable translating what sounds they hear into the letters that represent those sounds.  Writer's Workshop will continue to be part of our weekly routine throughout the course of the school year.  Keep up the great work K-2!

Treasures Reading Program
This week in our Treasures reading program our stories focused on the theme of families.  We read a story titled Whose Baby Am I? which talked about animal mothers and their babies.  We completed the activities in our Treasures workbook, which focused on the sound for the letter "m."  We also introduced a new word wall word---we.  Earlier this week, the students came home with a large Ziploc bag that contained three items--an ABC poster, a bag of sight word cards, and a bag of sight word books.  The materials in this bag are a great resource for you to use to reinforce some of the sounds and words we have been learning.  Please be sure to keep this Ziploc bag in your child's backpack as we will be adding materials to the bag each week.  I have included a picture of the bag below.

Thank you all so much for your commitment to your children's learning.

You are an amazing group of parents, and I am SO happy to be working with you this year!!