Room 26 News

February 3, 2012
FEBRUARY!
Wait – wasn't it just August about a month ago? The year is flying by! I am pleased to report, however, that lots of good things are happening here in room 26.
First of all, every one of the children is making significant progress in reading. The walls and ceiling are teeming with ice cream scoops. I can SEE the scoops, but I can HEAR the improvement in reading! The children's ease in reading is allowing us to focus a lot on comprehension skills and critical thinking. This week we are focusing on the readers and pushing ahead rapidly.
We are doing amazing things in math, too. We are working more with problem solving strategies; this week we listened to "The Elves and the Shoemaker" and planned out ways to solve several story problems about the story. Our best strategies right now are Draw a Picture and Write a Number Sentence, but as the children become more adept, they will be able to use more complex strategies, too.
We are having a lot of fun with fractions. I love fractions because they work so well with food! We played a fun pizza fractions game where we pretended to be going to Pizza Hut for lunch. Several pizzas were on the table, divided into various fractions. As the children spun the spinner, they took the indicated part of one of the pizzas to put on their plates. Pretending to eat was very fun. We worked similarly with some very appetizing pies, making our focus equivalent fractions. (If only the pies were real!) The children can see, with these manipulatives, that 2/4=1/2. It is amazing to me what they can understand given the correct complete examples.
In religion, we are continuing to learn about Jesus' miracles. This week we saw a great story on the flannelboard called "Through the Roof." You may recall that the friends of a paralyzed man lowered him through the roof of a house where Jesus was teaching. Jesus forgave his sins and made him walk again. The children were intrigued by the process of going through the roof! We also heard the story of Jairus' daughter who was brought back to life. What a great story for children! For a little variety, we watched a Youtube video of the ten lepers. The kids worried until I assured them it would have a happy ending. (We have an easy reader of this story called "Thank You Jesus" that I have put out at the Prayer Work Station for the children to read.) We are all amazed at these miracle stories.
We are wrapping up some cool writing projects. The best one is the culmination of all of our China projects. The children wrote about their experiences, including a good opening and closing sentence. We encouraged LONG writing (we like to write 3 sentences and be done) by making it very motivating to write a lot. After editing, the children copied their narratives onto paper shaped like a dragon body. They added a fierce head and scaly tail to the front and back. The more they wrote, the longer their dragons became! This worked great, as several reluctant writers decided to add on to their original pieces. Our sweeties have done a great job with this!
A couple of quick notes:
• Everyone has read 30 books! We can have the pizza party! I am planning to have it next Tuesday, Feb. 7. I am looking for donations of drinks, fruit, and dessert. Let me know if you'd like to send something in!
• Monday starts our math facts incentive program. Your child should have a race track stapled to his or her GO folder. Please do not color on it. We will color the last city PASSED each day, and then you will know to study the next set of facts. I think this is going to go well, and I hope we all get to Indianapolis soon!
• Remember for homework – focus on reading for the contest and practicing these math facts. Fill in other things as time permits.

Have a great weekend! Saturday is Senior Night at Dwenger, and Sam will be recognized at the basketball game. So I'll be there to cheer him on!
Mrs. E