A Week with the Marvelous Martians...

Important Dates and Reminders

January 8, 15, 22 and 29 (every Friday in January): swimming at the YMCA. Please wear swimsuits to school, but bring a complete change of clothes including a towel. If your child has a "Y" membership please send it to school with your child so that we do not have to pay for admission!

Friday Workshops:
January 8th:
Seth: how to make a book
Kainoa: making things out of clay

Math
SUBTRACTION! SUBTRACTION! SUBTRACTION! We have all begun investigating subtraction this week! Some of us are having our first experience with this new idea and practice writing subtraction signs and subtraction equations, playing games that reinforce the idea that subtraction means "taking things away", and learn different methods for solving subtraction equation. Other's revisiting this topic review a variety of strategies they use to solve subtraction equations and learn a new subtraction game (Grab Bag Subtraction). And the moment everyone has been waiting for (really the kids are asking for these!)...we will be putting our skills to the test as we work on some new subtraction worksheets!

Language Arts
What did you do over Winter Break? We were all so excited to see one another after Winter Break and to share stories of our time apart (so excited, in fact, that we could hardly stop talking!)...so we are using this inspiration to capture our adventures in writing during Writing Workshop! This week we focused on leaving spaces between our words and on planning our writing for the day with a partner. After trying out the partner planning, everyone agreed that it helped them to be a more directed writer when they went to the table to begin writing. I agree! Not even once did I hear "I don't know what to write about!"

Our phonics groups this week focused on: short o, qu wh tw and tr gr pr dr. Each group sorted picture cards into categories and recorded their findings with pictures and writing.

Reading groups will be focusing on: sounding out words/ pointing to words as they are read, practicing recognizing sight words, and forming connections between what we read and our lives. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE bring DEAR bags to and from school everyday! Each time the bag is brought to school the books will be replaced with new books at an appropriate level. Please make time for reading each night! Thank you!

Our phonics work continues to be interwoven throughout our week with quick games like Sound Hunt (I give them a sound and they have to find something in the room that starts with the sound) and Honey in the Pot (similar to Hangman minus the hanging man:).

Theme
We officially wrapped up our study of the planets by looking at the planets as a whole and comparing and contrasting many of their features...

Asteroid, Meteoroid, Meteorite and Meteors...we are working on learning the differences bewtween these space objects! It can be quite confusing, though fortunately we now have our very own books, complete with pictures and definitions to help us tell the difference! We also created posters in small groups of each of the objects and experimented making prints of these objects with an unexpected material! Take a look at these and see if you can guess what we used!

Stars are next on the horizon! Our week will wrap up with an art project with our Moon Tune buddies that explores the life and colors of stars!

Investigations
We are mixing things up! I noticed many students choosing to play with the same friends at the same activities for many days, so I decided that we would spend the first 10 minutes of each investigations time mixing things up a bit...this entails me choosing groups to play together at given activities! Our first experience with this was very positive, and many kids chose to stay at their activity longer than required! My hope is that this will allow kids to develop some new social skills as they play with friends they may not play with so often and that they will also have a chance to experience some new activities.