News from the Marvelous Martians

Important dates:

February 3rd: Parent Meeting

February 4th: all day field trip to Pacific Science Center

A Bit of Everything:

Our space travels have come to an end. We are sad to say goodbye to space explorations, but really excited for our upcoming trip to the rainforest! Yippee! We spent some time thinking and writing about all of the things we wonder and would like to learn about the rainforest. We are curious to know how much it rains in a rainforest, if there are cities in the rainforest, what kind of animals live in the rainforest, if there are any endangered animals in the rainforest, if people live there, if there are rivers...Wow! We should have lots of fun exploring!

Letters, letters, letters! We continue practicing our beautiful uppercase letter and have begun learning lower case letters! We've been working with chalk boards, clay, wooden blocks and good old paper and pencils to practice our strokes.

This week we are integrating our work with handwriting into many aspects of the curriculum. In math we are looking at the shapes of letters, as well as the strokes used to make them. What do the letters B, Q and R have in common? They are all made with both straight lines and curves! However this is not true for all letters. Some have just straight lines, and some just curves. We created Venn Diagrams to contrast and compare the capital letters in this way.

What do the letters O, R and A have in common? They all have interior regions! We looked at each letter and tried to imagine it as a fence. The ones with interior regions did a great job containing our dog, and the others, well...ooops! We had a fun time guessing whether our dog would spend more time roaming the neighborhood or right at home in our yard!

We added a bit of color to our handwriting lessons, as we used our best handwriting to create color-blocked water colors of our names. For some of us, the project also included the component of learning to spell our last names (or even what are last names were:). These are bright and vivid and add some wonderful color to our classroom, in the midst of our gray winter! Check these out on the closet doors!

After learning a basic definition of a rainforest, we again practiced our best handwriting to write the word rainforest and then decorated it in a way that would illustrate the definition. There were snakes for S's and monkeys swinging from A's!

New "Math Packs" have arrived! Our new packs include collection of worksheets that focus on vertical addition and subtraction, and missing parts equations for the ferns and a variety of addition and subtraction worksheets for the suns. Believe it or not the kids really enjoy these and frequently ask for more time to work on them! The worksheets are a nice way to solidify and demonstrate an understanding of the concepts we practice in our daily math games.

Speaking of games we learned a couple new ones this week! Suns learned a new game called Six in All. For this game each player has an assortment of cards numbered 1-6. The object is to pick pairs or groups of cards that total 6. For instance you may pick 4 and 2 or 3, 2, and 1. After making all the groups that you can, you record the resulting equations.

Ferns learned a new version of an old game. Rolling doubles now has an added twist! After rolling and doubling the number on the die, you must roll a second die with -2, -1, +1, +2 on it and do the math in your head. You might have to solve something like double 4 then subtract 2 or double 5 and add 1. You then place a chip on the corresponding number on your board, ultimately trying to get 5 in a row (although many prefer to play for total blackout of the board!).

We are almost to the halfway point of the year! Today was the 88th day of school! You may remember seeing at Fall conferences a sample of your child╒s writing that was collected at the beginning of the year for assessment purposes. This week I collected another sample. For theses samples students write completely independently about a chosen topic╤this time it was to write about a trip you╒ve taken. Feel free to ask if you╒d like to see the current sample compared to the earlier one.

Phonics groups this week focused on all short vowels, long o vowel patterns, long o and short o, and gr, tr, pr and dr. Groups sorted picture or word cards and then wrote sentences using as many words as they could (some of these were quite silly!) or practiced sounding out and writing words being sure to include a short vowel.

Reading groups focused on comprehension, making predictions and reading aloud fluently and with expression; predicting what a hidden word may be using only the first letter, the picture and the rest of the sentence as our clues; learning to put sounds together to form words; and trying to recognize a word as it appears multiple times in a story.

Jacob has inspired and lead us in learning new yoga poses this week! He has lent us a wonderful children's yoga book and we╒ve been making time each day to learn some new poses. Today I overheard someone commenting to a friend, "I can't wait 'til it's time for yoga!" Our new poses for today were the crooked branch and rainbow poses! Ask your child for a demonstration!