November 3 - 7

ANNOUNCEMENTS

Tuesday, November 11, Veterans Day
NO SCHOOL
Thank you to all of our Veterans!

Lego Club Dates: 11/17, 12/8
Reminder: Lego Club has switched to Mondays from now until February vacation

🌲 Maine Outdoor School FIELD TRIP: Tuesday, November 18th 9:00 - 1:00
We will be headed to Mariaville Falls for our Maine Outdoor School field trip.  We will be eating lunch there.  If your child usually has school lunch, I will plan on Ms. Katie packing a school lunch for them, unless I hear from you otherwise.

Wednesday and Thursday, November 12 + 13, Parent-Teacher Conferences

🎵 Wednesday, December 10: Holiday Concert, 6:00 PM

OUR WEEK

We have continued working on our narratives. This week we started to focus on adding sensory details to our story and started to work on exciting leads! Next week we will work on two other types of leads for stories (this week we practiced starting with dialogue and starting with a sound). Then, we will start to write our first draft!

In math, our kindergartners started working on sorting, classifying and comparing objects.  We played a fun game together, called "What's My Shape?". We use the attributes of shapes to narrow down what shape we have chosen.
First grade has started a unit on addition strategies to 10. This week we spent time practicing our doubles facts and near doubles facts.
Second grade is working on meanings of addition and subtraction. We are practicing a wide variety of addition and subtraction problems, including two step problems, problems with missing addends, and more complicated word problems.

In reading this week, we practiced using and understanding the words readers use: characters, setting, and plot. We used the story The Three Billy Goats Gruff to help us practice and remember these words.  When you read at home, it would be helpful if you talk about the story after reading and have your reader tell you the characters, setting, and the plot-what happened in the story.

On Friday, we did a fun activity to practice following directions. We read the book, "No, David!" and then I read directions of how to draw David.  Then we tried it again and I not only read the directions, but I demonstrated each step on the white board. We learned that listening AND watching the example was much easier- something we need to make sure we do in our day to day learning.  When we finished, we did a museum walkthrough to look at our pictures.

At Maine Outdoor School this week, we learned about animal communication. After reading a book about different ways animal communicate, we did a few different activities to practice communicating not using our voices.  We then played a game where we had to find our partners, while blindfolded. Each pair was given an animal and they had to make those animal calls to find their partner!