Newsletter 10/15

READING
We started a new theme in reading this week: “Colors All Around.” We read a big book, I Went Walking about a boy who starts out walking alone. One by one, different farm animals join in until the walk looks like a parade. We paid attention to the order of events in the story and used the words first, next, and last. We also are learning to retell the story by telling what happened at the beginning, tell the details of the story from the middle, and wrap it up with the ending. We read another big book, What Is Your Favorite Color? and made a graph showing our favorite color.
Our first alphafriend arrived this week – Sammy Seal. With each alphafriend we will practice the letter name (capital and lowercase), the sound that the letter makes, and practice it in handwriting time. Knowing the sound that each letter makes will help us to sound out words as we begin to read.
We were introduced to our first sight word – I. This school year we will get many sight words which we call “popcorn words” because they “pop” up often in our reading.
Colors days for red, yellow and blue were enjoyed by all!

MATH
Our math activities this week included: learning more about 7, 8, 9, and 10, making a number board using stickers to reinforce the meaning of numbers, and writing numbers correctly.

SCIENCE/SOCIAL STUDIES
To go along with the “Colors All Around” theme in reading, we started discussing the seasons and specifically our current season. We made many comparisons between the seasons, including clothing, out door activities, and weather. Fall provides many opportunities to look for colors. After a lovely fall walk around the neighborhood, we made a list of things that show us it is fall. We painted fall trees, used paper tearing to create colorful leaves for a tree, and learned to make leaf rubbings.
The field trip to Foster Woods was a fall highlight this week. We hunted for bugs, did nature rubbings, played hug a tree, and went on a scavenger hunt down the trail with Pam Holz the Washington County Naturalist.