Hello Families!
Thank you to all who already brought the canned goods for our “Stone Soup” we will be cooking on November 20th. We do a unit on various “Stone Soup” tales worldwide. It is a wonderful dive into how authors present their versions of this classic tale.
This past week we did a great job learning about telling time. They were fascinated with learning about sundials, and how gears work on analog clocks. We also did some more practice on learning to “see” how numbers we are adding are “making ten” or “ten + a few more”. I love seeing their eyes light up as they figure out new concepts.
We had a few visits from the 8th graders too. First, the 8th graders did a wonderful job with the solemn task of retiring the flag. As a school, we sat while they explained the importance of our flag and the care it takes to retire the flag. Afterward as a class we took the handout the 8th graders brought us and created a poem for the letters in the word, “Veterans”. This is called an acrostic poem. 8th graders picked up our decorated poems to send to veterans at a nearby Veterans Home. They also visited this week to teach first grade about a variety of saints. We love our 8th grade visits!
In reading, we are learning that the “s’ at the end of our words create a plural word. New readers tend to think it is a brand-new word. We are also learning new vocabulary such as “cot”, “dim”, and “dash”. Next to being able to decode a word is having background knowledge rich in vocabulary is essential to understand what you are reading. Another way we help grow our vocabulary is to use “text to self” connections. We take what we already know as a class and put it to good use by discussing how they know the word and if it is similar or different from how the reading passage uses the word. An example would be their love for dinosaurs helps them to readily understand the concept of “herbivore”. Which is a specialized academic word.
This Friday is our special, “Showcase and Sweets”. Please see “Red Family Envelope” or here on the website for times and tentative schedule.

Have a wonderful week!