February 8th, 2013- Community Helpers

Highlights from the Week:

• Special Theme of the Week: The start of Community Helpers
• Heart Word of the Week: and
• In language arts, we practiced figuring out the main idea of a nonfiction story and describing some of the supporting details.  We read another nonfiction story about maps and learned about what maps tell us and some of the key elements of a map.  We also practiced coming up with rhyming words, clapping syllables, and blending sounds together to read a word.
• In writing, we focus for the week was making sure the first letter in our sentence is capital.
• In math, we added a new center that teaches us about pennies and nickles.  It's called, "Beat you to 15 cents".  With this center, we are practicing exchanging pennies for nickles and comparing quantities.  During our Number Corner time (calendar), we are learning about 3 dimensional shapes.  We are learning what objects in the real world are spheres, cylinders, cubes, and cones.  
• During social studies, we started talking about community helpers.  We talked about how neat it was to have a hot chocolate shop in our classroom and decided it would be really cool to fill our classroom with all types of shops.  After reading some books and learning about shops within a town, we decided it would be a great idea to turn our classroom into a town!  Be have been working hard brainstorming what we want our town to look like.
• During community centers, we continued with retelling the story of, The Mitten.  We also continued building hibernation homes out of blocks and drawing on a map a birds journey south.  Our favorite center has  continued to be our construction zone with our ice blocks.  We have really enjoyed figuring out all the neat things we can build with all the different sizes and shapes.