January/February Newsletter 2017

What is a Community?

During our COMMUNITY Unit, the children took a look first at the smallest community that they are a part of, their families. We learned that families are alike and different and that there are roles that we each play within our family in order to make it successful. We then learned about our classroom community and began a job chart in classroom to help our classroom community run more efficiently. As we have compared and contrasted communities, we have noticed that successful communities all seem to have the following:   jobs, living things, a common place, beliefs, goals, leaders and rules. As we keep expanding to study communities, our next logical step was to learn about our school community. In order to do this, we took a  tour of some of the important places in our school community and got to learn about the jobs people are doing every day within our community. We asked them what their job entails and what tools they need to do it.

Recently we have begun to learn about our city Community, which for most of us is Beaufort. We have talked about what cities need to be successful, why we need certain places in our community, and our role and place within our city. This has involved using Google Earth to find our houses and other places in our city, learning our addresses, making replicas of our houses and even creating buildings to make our own 3D community.
As we have been learning about jobs in the community, we got a chance to read and talk about all of YOUR jobs. Thank you so much for sharing them with us! The kids LOVED making the learning so personal to them and seeing a glimpse of the millions of jobs available to them. We were also lucky enough to have Firefighter Joe and Firefighter Ross from the Port Royal Fire Department come in to our school to teach us about their job and why they are important to the community. They also taught us about fire safety and even showed us their fire truck!
In the coming weeks we will learn about our city and then our state and even place a field trip to get our and SEE our city community first hand. Stay tunes for more information!

Literacy

As you know, our Daily Five rotations consist of 5 choices. 1. Read to Self- we practice reading books on our own reading level. 2. Read to Someone- we read appropriate level texts to or WITH a buddy. 3. Work on Writing-we “write” the room, books, stories and practice labeling pictures. 4. Listen to Reading- stories are read aloud to us on cd players or leapreaders to help with comprehension and fluency. 5. Word Work- we explore and practice with letters and words. 
This time of our day is when each student receives targeted instruction on his/her appropriate level from the teachers in small groups while the rest of the students are engaged in independent literacy activities from our Daily Five. Some students are working on Guided Reading with Ms Liz and others are doing Word Study groups with Ms Tricia. Our Guided Reading groups and word study groups are going wonderfully and the students are all growing as readers and writers.

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Math

​We love using our calendar binders to keep track of days of the week, the months of the year, the weather and more. Each child has their own binder to make working with the date each day even more personal. It is amazing how many math concepts are tied into the date!
Our math focus has shifted over the past few weeks from base ten to attributes and then on to 3D shapes. The children began noticing how items are alike and different and practiced sorting them in to categories. We learned that there are a LOT of different attributes to identify and ways to sort objects. Some ways are easier (like color and shape) and some were more difficult (like lives in the water/doesn't live in the water). We had fun sorting objects, buttons and even ourselves! We then were introduced to 2D and 3D shapes and began to notice their attributes and sort them. Students are beginning to identify 3D shapes such as pyramids, rectangular prisms, cubes, cylinders, spheres, hemispheres, hexagonal prisms, triangular prisms, cones and more! We have learned the difference between 2D and 3D shapes and have looked at which 2D shapes we put together to make a 3D shape. We have also studied vertices, edges, and faces on various 2 and 3D shapes. Ask your child to find 2D and 3D shapes in their environment. Can they tell you how many faces/edges/vertices it has?

Our Buddies

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Our buddies are now visiting us twice a week most weeks. On Tuesday mornings, they lead our morning meetings. On Thursdays, we get together to do an activity in the afternoon. We have loved getting to play new games and get to know each other more during our morning meetings together! We also love our activity time and some of the activities that we have done together include making family glyphs to compare/contrast our families, drawing and completing venn diagrams comparing their classroom community to ours and using their ipads to create collages about our favorite places in Beaufort.