The Groundhog Knew

Before leaving school that last day of January we each took a guess as to what Punxsutawney Phil would see on February 2nd.  Most guessed he'd see his shadow (meaning 6 more weeks of winter), and he did!  Having some snow this month sure did bring some smiles and several comments of, "this is the best day ever!" when it snowed during our recess.  We also enjoyed celebrating our friends on a delayed Valentine's Day Tuesday the 18th. 

Social Emotional Learning: Students are learning how to tell people what they are feeling by using "I" statements.  They go like this:  "I feel ________ when you _______, next time please _________.  Using this sentence frame in place of yelling, "Stop" or going immediately to tattling or worse, pushing/hitting, gives students more independence over their relationships and their own comfort and safety.  

In addition we're talking about when to say sorry and how this is something we do to show we care about those around us.  Saying, "sorry" is not the same as saying "sorry I hurt you on purpose," because it is most often an accident or misunderstanding.  Saying sorry is recognizing someone else's feelings and seeing what you could do to make them feel better.  Apologizing, or just confirming you heard someone share their feelings (either verbally or with body language), helps mend hurt feelings faster than almost anything else. 

I introduced the Zones of Regulation on Friday the 21st and we'll continue to talk about these more as we move through the remainder of the year.  You'll see a paper in their things that they took home about this and you can read more about it here.  Being able to identify what zone you are in at any given time can help you understand what to do to help yourself feel better.  We'll practice identifying zones and learning to use multiple tools to help ourselves.  Hanging up the Zones paper in your house may be helpful when working through big feelings at home.Here's a few songs we heard when learning about the Zones of Regulation:  

SONG 1  and  SONG 2

Social Studies: For Black History Month we started by learning about "Change Makers".  First we talked about people who helped others escape from slavery, primarily, Harriett Tubman and the Underground Railroad.  We reviewed what we learned about Martin Luther King Jr in January and read about his friend and brave change maker, Rosa Parks.  Last week students got to learn about Ruby Bridges, who is still alive today, and the bravery she showed during school desegregation.  This study of change makers and important people in history will continue past the end of February.  

 Harriett Tubman

 Rosa Parks

    Ruby Bridges

Foundational Skills in Phonological Awareness and Literacy: Recently we started more actively hearing long vowel sounds in words and noticing how they change words (mad/made,  tap/tape, or cot/coat-- we are not learning the spelling patterns for long vowels yet).  The completed workbook for Unit 3 Week 2 went home this week, however some students may still need to finish some pages.  These do not need to be turned in to me, but they are good for practice at home.  During our Social Studies we are practicing reading "heart words" (words that we have to memorize); keep up the practice at home (I, a, and, the, is, was, to).

  Vowel Sounds Workout

After studying Three Little Pigs, we enjoyed reading and using our knowledge of stories to discuss The Little Red Hen.  Again, students identified characters, noticed how they were described in the story, and setting.  In addition we learned that all good stories have a problem, events to show characters dealing with the problem, and a resolution. We made up our own class story about a dog in the winter who couldn't dig a hole because the ground was frozen; see if your child can remember our events and resolution. For fun, we also read The Little Red Fort which follows the basic story line of Little Red Hen with a few twists. Here are some readings that were on YouTube if students would like to read them with you.

 

We finished reading Peach Picking and Lei Harvest and student will take home the black and white collection of these next Friday.  We started reading the next group of books starting with Garden Party about building a community Garden in New Orleans and making a huge pot of Gumbo to share with everyone.   And during our read aloud time we finished the third Mercy Watson book, Mercy Watson Fights Crime and we just started Mercy Watson Princess in Disguise.

             

Math: This month we focused on writing numbers 6-10 correctly; a great thing to practice at home too.  We played a few games to practice turn taking and following directions; also something that everyone could practice more of at home.  Our games let us practice adding and subtracting to 10, using ten frames to organize big numbers and compare quantities (using words like "greater than" and "less than") and the introduction of a "number path", which is similar to a "number line", but each number has it's own box around it.  This helps us practice the concept of numbers getting bigger as you go up (to the right) and smaller as you go down (to the left).