Mrs. Ruggieri’s Classroom News December 4, 2015  Dear Families, After this week, your children are now owl experts! They learned so much about owls’ habitats, food, bodies, feathers, nature, and so much more through our owl unit. Take a look at all of our learning from this week!

• We learned about the letters Qq and Zz. We will learn the last two letters of the alphabet next week!

• Wingmasters came to visit us on Tuesday. We met an Eastern Screech Owl, a Barred Owl, a Barn Owl, a Saw Whet Owl, and a Great Horned Owl. We read many books about owls, and we also wrote a teaching book about owls as a class.

• We learned the high frequency words “he” and “my.” • We read the big book My Big Bear. We learned about the

superpower of finding the tricky word and thinking about what would make sense. We also practiced finding the tricky word and writing it down.

• We learned the poems “Little Hoot Owl” and “Quack, Quack, Quack.”

• We pretended to be hungry owls and searched for “mice” with snap words on them. We read the words in order to “eat” the mice.

• In writing, we practiced stretching out words and writing more sounds that we hear on the page. I encourage you to help your child say the words he/she writes very slowly, stopping at each sound and writing a matching letter on the page. We practiced writing stories that

are “easy to understand” and shared our true stories with a writing partner to see if there were any other details or labels we could add.

• In math, we practiced ordering the numbers 0-10 with games called “Line Up” and “Beat the Timer.” We also played a racing dice game where the children rolled a dice with the numerals 1-6 to see which numeral would “win” (to reach the top of the game board first). We also estimated how many pockets we were wearing as a whole class and checked our answer by counting with cubes. In all, the children wore 38 pockets today!

• We shared many of our special Hearts and Homes projects. The children love hearing about each others’ families!

• In addition to learning about owls this week, we also studied symmetry. We looked at pictures of animals and other natural things that have symmetry and made our own symmetrical pictures.

• In social learning, we learned about Dangerous and Destructive behaviors. A dangerous behavior is when someone could get hurt. A destructive behavior is when something could be destroyed or when someone’s feelings are hurt over and over. The children are encouraged to tell an adult right away when they see a “Double D Behavior” at school, on the playground, or on the bus.

• We read My Big Bear, Symmetry in Nature, Owl Babies, Owl Moon, Little Owl Lost, Owls, The Barn Owls, Zach Apologizes, and Brown Bear Brown Bear What Do You See?.

* Special Notes *

   

• School Picture Retakes will be held on Friday, December 11th. Please contact the Main Office if you would like your child to

have a photo retake. I also have a few extra copies of our class picture. If you did not receive one, please let me know, and I will send one home for you!

Sincerely, Michelle Ruggieri J mruggieri@carlisle.k12.ma.us