Focuses for this week:

Community focus questions:
-How do we handle disappointment?
-How do we use our words to communicate kindly and clearly with our friends? When is it ok to use our bodies to communicate (faces show feelings; thumbs up or high five) or not ok (grabbing instead of asking; hitting to express frustration)?
-How do we continue to show respect to those around us, to ourselves, and to others' property or shared property?

ELA:
-Phonemic awareness through Heggerty lessons.
-Phonics through our Phonics Dance.
-Learning concepts of print (parts of a book, directionality in reading, role of author/illustrator) and comprehension concepts (characters and setting, making predictions) through Read Alouds.
-Our Small Group instruction is well underway! Some students are shoring up their knowledge of letters and sounds; others are beginning to decode CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant pattern) words; others are using their decoding strategies to decode full lines of text and read simple books!
-With handwriting, we're continuing to practice our Pencil Pathways. We are starting to get into forming letters, working through them in a developmental sequence.
-In Writing, we're learning to tell a story through pictures! We're also doing directed drawings to build confidence in drawing and telling stories through pictures. Details are important! We are now starting to label our drawings by writing letters to represent the sounds we hear in words!

Math:
-We're working hard on learning our teen numbers! This includes saying them in order when we count, writing them by putting the one first and then the other part of the number (writing 14 instead of 41), and lots of activities that help us practice breaking them down into a group of ten and some extra ones (i.e. 14 is a group of ten and four extra ones). We are beginning to work with place value and representing these numbers with a ten "stick" and some one "squares."
-We're continuing to solidify our understanding of patterns. Students should be able to continue a pattern when they see the "stem" of the pattern, and to build a pattern when told which kind of pattern to build (AB, ABC, ABB, AAB, AABB, ABCD).
-We continue to practice counting to 100 by tens and ones.
-We continue to explore number patterns within the hundreds chart.
-We spend some time each week practicing identifying shapes and sorting objects by their attributes.

Science:
We're finally getting started with Science! We're learning lots about seasons and weather, and starting to observe and record daily weather to look for patterns. We're also learning about leaves and pumpkins!