Mrs.O'Bryan's

 Our home page features updates about our weekly adventures in the JK class!

We have moved on from our winter theme in the classroom this week (now if only the outside would catch on)! This week our mornings have been filled with penny wars and fine motor boxes. We have switched to our valentine fine motor boxes and for the most part they are a hit. Some of the boxes require a little bit more focus and/or team work then they are used to but they are ready for the challenge. 

This week we did our February handwriting and drawing assessment. I will show those results at conferences; it always amazes me to see how for they come in their handwriting in such short time! We looked at the letters I and T this week and really worked on the vowel sounds I. We have been introduced to all the vowel sounds now, I believe, so I wanted to take a minute when introducing I to talk again about E, as these two vowel sounds take longer to hear the difference. We put our hands on our cheeks to feel what they do when we make the E sound then we put our hand on our chin to feel what it does when we make the I sound. We then talked about words that start with the short e sound and words the start with the short i sound. Lastly, we reviewed the AT word family and introduced the OG word family. We put these letters on our board and sounded them out. Then we took turns picking a letter to put in from of our AT or OG words. We then sounded them out to discover what word we had made. If it was not a real word, we made up a meaning for the word we had created... did you know that 'mog' is a type of tree (invented by Ben!)

In Math, we started learning about shapes this week. We identified MANY 2d shapes. We learned how to count sides and 'vertices' (fancy word for points) in the shapes. We reviewed the prefixes Hexa, Penta and Octo and how that helps us remember some of those harder shapes to identify. We also started learning about 3d shapes and what make them different from 2d shapes (they are not flat and they have 'empty space' that you can fill!); specifically focusing on the sphere, cone and cube. We put it all together on Friday by making many of these shapes with play dough! They also used their shape knowledge to make watercolor salt shapes with Mrs. Ella.

We got to celebrate Patrick and Ben's birthdays this week. We also got to see Teddy's show and tell about his car track that he got for Christmas and Makayla's spinney chair and stuffies! Next week, we will not have any show and tell since it will be a short week with our Valentines party on Tuesday and conferences on Wednesday/Thursday. Winter break will begin on Thursday (with a half day) and conclude when we return on Wednesday the following week. When we return from break, we will start a study on polar animals, but hope that it is less polar outside!

Have a great weekend and I look forward to seeing everyone on Monday!