Click HERE to see the full schedule for the Fun Fair tomorrow. Please come support the school!  

We learned a lot about Abraham Lincoln after his visit.  You'll see our Abraham Lincoln's in the classroom next time you visit.  One of the things we learned about Lincoln was that he used his hat to hide notes that he did not want to forget.  We wrote some things about Lincoln that we did not want to forget and tucked it in his hat.  Pictures to follow!

It was great seeing all of you last week for conferences.  I enjoyed the opportunity to share your child's work with you and answer questions about your child's daily life at school.  Please do not hesitate to follow up on our conversations if you have lingering questions.

I can't wait to see you all at the Fun Fair this Saturday!  Be sure to buy those tickets after school tomorrow to save yourself some time in line!  Also-don't forget to send in those quarters from the couch cushions so your child can vote for the Pie in the Face competition!  Finally, it's not too late to contribute to the Dancin' for Desserts!  This is an easy one!  You can buy an item and drop it off!

We had a special visitor on Tuesday!  Mr. Abraham Lincoln came and told us about his life.  He taught us a lot and I think he was impressed by how much we already knew.  Thanks, PTO for funding this great event for all of Kindergarten and First Grade!

Reading:  We are focusing on main idea and details this week. We read a Rosa Parks book and watched a video of this brave woman.  We will continue to work on visualizing while we read.

Math:  During math we are working on writing number sentences and on comparing two numbers.  As you can see from the homework we are also working on writing our numbers.

Science:  We continue to look at water and we will learn how water moves in waves and in plants!

100s Day

Thanks to all the parents who came in to help with our 100 celebration.  Due to the snow days, our actual 100th day of school is next Tuesday.  We will do a few things to extend our celebration of the number 100! Pictures and Video coming soon.

Reading:  We finished up our Mo Willems author study with some opinion writing about our favorite book.  The students did and excellent job giving reasons why their favorite book was the best.  You will see these at conferences.

Writing:  In addition to doing our opinion writing and some narrative writing during our Writers Workshop time, we have been focusing on adding details to our stories.  Do you remember when we had our curriculum night and I said our writing stamina was six minutes?  Can you believe we are up to 22 minutes of writing??

Math:  Obviously our focus this week was on the number 100.  We also started a new daily calendar and we will explore concepts such as making 10, odd and even, subtraction and describing the attributes of shapes.

Science:  Finally!  We have caught up with assessments and can finally begin our study of water.  We will learn about the properties of water, how water is attracted to water, how water moves and the states of water (solid, liquid, gas.)

Dates to Remember:
PLEASE CHECK THE LINK FOR YOUR CONFERENCE TIME.

Feb. 12 and 13:  Half days for Parent Teacher Conferences
Feb. 16:  No school Presidents Day
Feb. 18:  Silent Auction Online Portion begins at 6:00 pm.  There will be a link on the PTO site.  Some parties go fast!
Feb. 20:  10:00 pm  Online Silent Auction closes.
Feb. 21:  Fun Fair  (See Glossary of Fun Fair definitions.)

Fun Fair Glossary of Definitions

Is this your First Fun Fair?  If it is, you may be confused about all the different emails and flyers that are coming home and will be coming home.  Here is a crash course in our biggest fundraiser of the year.

Silent Auction-- There are two parts to this.  

Teacher and Parent Parties

These are parties or events hosted by teachers and parents.  There is usually a "flat fee" for participating.  The spots can fill up fast, so be sure to check out the online portion right away at 6:00 on February 18th.  There are a lot of great events.  Together with the Kindergarten teachers, I am hosting a games and giggles and pizza party.  It should be lots of fun!  With a few other grade levels I am hosting a movie party and I'll also be doing a "Dancing with the Stars" with my talent show team.  It would be great to see lots of my students at these events. 

Teacher events

These are separate from the parties.  This is usually an individual teacher with just one or two students.  These are bid on at the silent auction.  The winner is the highest bidder.  For this one I will be walking with a student to Pete's for lunch.  Yum.

Fun Fair---There's lots going on this day, too!

Tickets

You pay for almost everything with tickets.  There are advance ticket sales the week before the Fun Fair after school.  You can also get them at the door.  The more you buy, the more you do.  

Carnival Games

These are in the gym.  Each game usually costs one or two tickets.  This is great especially for the younger kids.

Cake Walk

This is the traditional cake walk game.  Music is played.  When it stops they call a number.  If you are on that number you get to pick a cake. PLEASE CONSIDER MAKING COOKIES, CAKES, CUPCAKES, ETC FOR THE CAKE WALK!

Staff Talent Show

This is the highlight of the Fun Fair for lots of people.  Many teachers participate in this fun (humiliating) event.  This is at the end of the Fun Fair.  It is loud and crowded and lots of fun.  It is in the auditorium.  Yes.  I'm in the talent show.  I dance (poorly) with Ms. Collins, Ms. Noonan, Mrs. Solomon,  Ms. Kekatos and Mrs. Sak.  We're kind of a big deal.  :)

Silent Auction

There are many items and events in the auction.  Our community is very generous.  This is also where the class baskets are.  Ours is sure to be a big hit!

Pie in the Face

Groups of teachers are on teams.  Your child decides which team gets a PIE IN THE FACE!!!  Kids bring in pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, dollars...you get the idea!  The team who raises the most money gets the pie...in the face!  I'm on Team Pie Schmie.  The winner of the Pie in the Face contest is announced at the end of the Fun Fair after the Talent Show.

How awesome is our school???!!!!  

FIVE DAYS!!! FIVE WHOLE DAYS!!!

It was great to spend a whole week with your children!

Reading:  We continue to love reading the Mo Willems books.  We wrote about whether or not we would let the pigeon drive the bus.  (8 said yes, 6 said no and we had one maybe!)  Then we imagined other things the Pigeon should not be able to do.  Come in and see this great writing!   After reading the pigeon books, we enjoyed reading Knuffle Bunny.  We could all relate to that story.  So many of them had stories of losing something important to them that we decided to write about that, too!  Those stories will be shared with you at conferences.

Writing:  We are reviewing narrative writing and continue to work on opinion writing.  We are also focusing on using correct letter formation and punctuation.  Keep practicing those sight words!

Math: We are working on number writing and groups of 10.  Our main focus is on number sentences.  We are practicing writing addition number sentences on our own and writing subtraction number sentences together.  Obviously calendar time is very exciting as we get closer and closer to our 100th day of school!

Upcoming Dates:
Upcoming Dates:
February 5: 100th day celebration
February 12 and 13:  Half days for parent teacher conferences
February 16:  Presidents Day-No school
February 21:  Fun Fair and Silent Auction!!  Please pay attention to information coming home about the major fund raisers of the year.   (Our own Room Mother, Kim Vander Griend is coordinating the silent auction!  Let's represent, Room 116!)

March 6th:  Author Visit

• Award-winning author, Aaron Reynolds is coming to Irving on March 5th! 
• Schedule:  8:30-9:30 2nd/3rd grade, 10:00-11:00 4th/5th grade, 12:45-1:15 K/1st grade
• All presentations will be in the auditorium.
• Book order forms will be going home to students in mid-February.

January 19-23

Please look at the conference schedule that is on the left.  If you have any conflicts let me know ASAP!

Reading:  We are loving our Mo Willems author study.  He is so entertaining and inspires the kids to read and write!  We will write our opinion about the best Mo Willems book next week.   In the meantime, ask your child if he would let the pigeon drive the bus!

Writing:  We are working on opinion writing and narrative writing.  We are focusing on making sure that there are no capital letters in the middle of our sentence.  We also learned that "baby i" never goes walking alone.  It needs to be a capital letter if it is a word!

Math:  We are working on number bonds and number stories.  We are really working on counting to 100!  We can't wait for our 100th day of school celebration!!!

Social Studies:  We read a lot of books about MLK and will continue to learn about his work in February when we learn about Rosa Parks and Ruby Bridges.

Today we had a lock down drill.  It went well and the kids did a great job sitting quietly until we got the all clear.  Next time we will not have a warning that it is happening, but I am confident that the kids will do great!  I simply stated that sometimes it is safer to go outside, like during a fire drill and other times it is safer to stay inside.

If you have not already signed the permission slip for Young Athletes, please do so.  If you have not already offered to help with our 100th day party, please consider donating part of the snack or part of your day to help us out!



Upcoming Dates:
February 5: 100th day celebration
February 12 and 13:  Half days for parent teacher conferences
February 16:  Presidents Day-No school
February 21:  Fun Fair and Silent Auction!!  Please pay attention to information coming home about the major fund raisers of the year.   (Our own Room Mother, Kim Vander Griend is coordinating the silent auction!  Let's represent, Room 116!)

January 12-15

We had a great week in the classroom and enjoyed our routine!

Reading:  We took a few summative assessments this week on different literature standards.  The kids did great!  We will continue to work on retelling stories and making connections between words and pictures.

Math:  We continue to work on number bonds to 5 and counting by 10s.  We are also working on story problems and writing equations to go with them.

Writing:  We continue to work on opinion writing.  Next week we will begin reading a bunch of Mo Willems books and learn some of his strategies for writing great books.  At the end of this author study we will write an opinion piece about which Mo Willems book is our favorite and tell why.

Science:  We never got started on the Water and Weather unit.  Those snow days put us behind!

100th day:  Hopefully the hearts came home in decent shape and your child is excited about collecting 100 awesome things!  Have fun!  The heart can be returned whenever it is completed.  You also should find a list of requested snack donations for that day in your child's folder.  Please consider donating a box of cereal or other treat.

Book Order:  Use the link to the left to order books from Scholastic.  The fliers went home in folders today.  We are officially half way through winter...which means we still have half of winter left.  That's a lot of extra time for reading!

Upcoming Dates:
January 16:  Institute Day-  No school for students
January 19:  MLK Day-No school
February 5: 100th day celebration
February 12 and 13:  Half days for parent teacher conferences
February 16:  Presidents Day-No school
February 21:  Fun Fair and Silent Auction!!  Please pay attention to information coming home about the major fund raisers of the year.   (Our own Room Mother, Kim Vander Griend is coordinating the silent auction!  Let's represent, Room 116!)

January 5, 6, (Not 7th and 8th) and 9

Well, obviously we did not get to all the things I had planned for the week...

Reading:  Students are being encouraged to use the beginning letter of a word and then look at the picture to figure out unknown words.  We are also working on understanding the relationship of pictures to texts.

Writing:  We started some opinion writing.  We are also focusing on punctuation marks at the end of our sentences.

Math:  We continue to work on decomposing numbers and number bonds.  Right now we are making sure we have a firm grasp on all the different ways to make 5.  (1+4, 2+3, 5+0, 4+1, 3+2, 0+5).  As soon as these are proficient we will work on ways to make 10.  Additionally, we are learning how to draw pictures to help us solve story problems.

Science:  Next week we will begin to discuss weather and water.  (Good timing, huh?)

100s Day
Sooo..... obviously we are now behind on our March to 100 days of school.  As soon as we can confirm the date for our celebration I will send an email.  I do all the planning of this big celebration of the number 100, but we need lots and lots (and lots) of help to make this day successful.  Please watch for emails.  I will be asking for donations to our 100 snack.  Thanks in advance!

Upcoming Dates:
January 16:  Institute Day-  No school for students
January 19:  MLK Day-No school
February 5? 6? 9?:  Rescheduled 100th day celebration (To be confirmed ASAP)
February 12 and 13:  Half days for parent teacher conferences
February 16:  Presidents Day-No school
February 21:  Fun Fair!!!