A few housekeeping things up front:
1. Students have a half day this Friday and then we are off for mid winter break on Monday and Tuesday.
2. Our Valentines party will be on Wednesday, February 14 from 2:45 - 3:30. This party is super low key so I won't need any parent volunteers in the classroom. You may feel free to come in if you would like, but we will just be decorating cookies and passing out our valentines. Please let me know if you have any questions. I will be sending out e-mails soon to those who volunteered to help provide the cookie decorating things and the drinks :)
3. I am excited to share the date for our John Ball Zoo field trip! We will be going on Thursday, May 24. There will be more details to come later, but I wanted you to have enough time in advance to take off of work if you needed to. There is no limit to the amount of adults that can come with us. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Last week Friday the kids earned another star party and we celebrated by having extra recess and it was SO great! The sun was out and the weather was warmish. The kids had a great time having the playground to themselves for a bit :) Here are some pictures for you. If your child didn't make it in one I'm sorry! They were all running around and it was hard to get them all.
In reading we are continuing to learn about non-fiction text. We are taking it to the next level! The kids have been learning about how to read non-fiction books and how to use the text features. They have also been working on how to ask questions and make comparisons about the books they are reading. The kids are now going to show all that they have learned. They are either working in pairs or by themselves, their choice, to create a poster on a non-fiction topic of their choosing. The kids are reading about their topic through books and then creating a poster that has at least 3 facts, 2 text features, and a title. The poster has to be done neatly and be readable. We will be working on these posters the rest of this week and next week.
In math we just started a new unit. The skill we are working on right now is finding a missing partner with totals to 20. We are building on the skill of addition sentences such as 8 + ? = 13. Next, we are taking those strategies and applying them to subtraction sentences such as 13 - 8 = ?
We are wrapping up our geography unit this week with a test. We had fun this week looking at petoskey stones and talking about Michigan.
I hope that you all have a great mid winter break!