Week of Sept. 29 - Oct. 3

Dear Parents,

This is going to be a short week for us. We decided to have an Author Study about Eric Carle. If you have any books about this wonderful author please send them with your child to school. We will be reading some of his books and watching interesting videos about the way he creates his books.

Some of the books that we chose to read in class are the following:

Poor Hermit Crab! He's outgrown his snug little shell, so he finds himself a larger one -- and many new friends to decorate and protect his new house. But what will happen when he outgrows this shell, and has to say good-bye to all the sea creatures that have made Hermit Crab's house a home? Children will also learn a lot about the fascinating world of marine life along the way.

The barnyard rooster crows and Jack wakes up -- hungry, of course! What does he want for breakfast? A big pancake! But first, Jack's mother needs flour from the mill, an egg from the black hen, milk from the spotted cow, butter churned from fresh cream, and firewood for the stove. Will Jack ever get his pancake?

This is a wonderful book to rewrite emphasizing phonemic awareness. Something that you can do at home is that for each day of the week, have your child list foods that begin with the same letter as that particular day: Monday, meatballs, macaroni, mashed potatoes; Tuesday, tacos, tomatoes, tuna; etc.

An artist is asked by an unseen friend to draw a star. The star then asks the artist to draw the sun. The sun asks for a tree, and before long an entire universe has sprung up. Night falls, the moon rises, the moon asks for a star, and the circle is complete. 

The children will get the chance to decorate their own stars.

A newly hatched caterpillar eats his way through all kinds of food, getting bigger and bigger, until eventually he turns into a beautiful butterfly.

We will study the life Cycle of a Butterfly. We will be doing a unit with the story The Very Hungry Caterpillar. The students will be retelling the story with cards, acting it out with stick puppets, and making arts and crafts that go along with the story. If you have any stories that talk about butterflies, please let us borrow them from you. The vocabulary we will be discussing is egg, caterpillar, cocoon, butterfly, and cycle.

In our Phonemic Awareness, the children are going to be identifying rhyming words.

Rhyming teaches children how language works.  It helps them notice and work with the sounds within words.

We will continue working with the sight words that were introduced last week. These words are as, with, his, they and of. Please practice, practice and practice these words daily with your child at home. As evaluation week approaches, we would like to encourage you to practice ALL the 20 sight words the children will be evaluated on. (the, to, and, a, I, in, is, you, that, it, he, was, for, on, are). The children will be assessed in these 20 sight words for the first quarter of their report card.

In Science we will start a new theme about MY BODY. This week we will mainly review concepts the students should already know. We will be talking about eyes, nose, mouth, ears, head, shoulders, knees, toes, hands, fingers, arms. If you have any poster or any other material that you are willing to share with the class, we would appreciate if you will let us borrow them from you.

Please practice the following skills with your child at home:

Numbers and counting up to 10

C.5     Count by typing - up to 10

C.6     Count up - with pictures

We will be taking the second part of the Reading test on Monday, September 29th at 8:30 a.m. Please try not to miss school this day!

A special thank you goes to Sebastian Ortez and Tammy Rodriguez for bringing the ingredients for Kinder Kafe last week. The children enjoyed doing a delicious banana split using bananas, vanilla and chocolate ice cream, whip cream and chocolate syrup. They loved it! This week there will be NO Kinder Kafe due to the holiday on Friday, October 3^rd.