Week of 12/10

Hopefully everyone is enjoying this holiday season, despite the chaos and sickness. So many of our students are out sick. Our class has been pretty lucky (knock on wood), but CAES has gotten hit pretty hard with the flu, so keep encouraging thorough hand-washing! 

We have some exciting things coming up at school. Next Tuesday, 12/18  is Polar Express Day (this is changed from the original 12/19 date). On that day, students can come to school in their pajamas and bring a stuffed animal and towel/blanket. We will be doing various Polar Express activities, seeing the annual train demonstration in the lobby (after lunch), and watching the Polar Express movie in the afternoon. 

Mrs. Fannon has been busy planning our holiday party, which is Wednesday, 12/19 at 10:00 a.m. We would love to see you there! She is planning crafts and a breakfast for the kids. Many thanks to all that have volunteered to help.

Here is a look at what we'll be working on this week:
This week's story: Communities (goes well with our economics unit!)
Strategy: Making connections
Skill: Classifying (sorting things into groups)
Phonics: two sounds of c and g (i.e. city/cat and gum/gym
Writing: adding detail sentences, complete sentences, capitalization, punctuation, 4-square organization of writing (these skills are ongoing)

Math:
We are continuing to work on fractions (SOL 1.3). Students now understand that fractions represent parts of a whole or parts of a group. Fractions are all around us - look for them at home when you have equal parts of something - pizza, candy, anything that can be broken up into equal parts. We've been working with halves, thirds, and fourths, so anytime you can incorporate fractions, it's a great way to show your child that math is everywhere! I love it  when I hear them at lunch say, "I ate 2/4 of my orange!". At school today, we used unifix cubes, wikki sticks, and popsicle sticks to show halves of a group: 

Here students had to circle 1/2 of the blocks. We talked about how the 2 represents how many equal parts make up the whole (so we need to make 2 equal groups), and the 1 represents the part that we need to circle.

Once we got the hang of making equal parts (using the popsicle stick to separate the parts), we practiced on our sheets. We still used the blocks to manipulate the groups and blocks, but then used a crayon on the paper to mark where we divided the parts that made up the whole. They did a great job with this!! Tomorrow they will be working on fourths of a group.

Social Studies:
As you've seen in the homework folder, we've been working on our economics unit (SOLs 1.7, 1.8, and 1.9). Students are learning the differences between wants and needs (GREAT for holiday time!), goods and services, and producers and consumers. Thanks to everyone who took the time to fill out our producers and consumers sheet - the kids loved that YOU had homework! =) Students are learning all about making good economic choices (i.e. do I really need it?) and later this week, we will focus on the importance of saving money and how that impacts our economic choices. The kids loved playing "Guess my word" with our vocabulary words today. You should try this at home... ask your child how to play! 

Important reminders/notes:

• Holiday Shop ends on Friday. If you send money in the blue envelope that was sent home last week, students can go to purchase items when they finish their work or when they are done eating lunch. 
• Have a great week!