Dear Families,

Happy New Year!  I wanted to first thank all the families for the generous gift of the Bertuccis gift card and the snuggly mittens!  It so nice to work with such caring families!  I also wanted to thank Mrs. Dodge, Mrs. Nolan, Mrs. Roux and Ms. Wambolt for a fabulous winter party.  The children had so much fun!

I would also like to take this opportunity to welcome Lauren Ingoldsby.  Lauren is a freshman at Endicott College and doing her student teaching in our classroom during the month of January.  We are so excited to have her in our classroom!

Here are is what's going on in Room 24 this month...

In reading, we have been focusing on non-fiction to pair up with our new writer's workshop unit  which we just introduced.  The children are so excited to be trying out a new type of writing.  We have many experts in our class that are ready to teach us many new things!

In Fundations, we are finishing up our unit on suffix "s" and will be introducing more glued or welded sounds in the next couple weeks.  We will start with the -ng ending (-ing, -ang, -ong, and -ung) and then move into the -nk ending.  Ask your child to show you our way of tapping using 3 fingers for these sounds.

In math, we are finishing up Topic 6 on survey questions and data collection.  The children have become very good at showing data in the form of tally marks and a picture graph.  They have also worked on interpreting this data using the words most, more than, fewest, fewer than, and equal.  On Friday, we did a quick survey on how many children were left and right handed in the class.  We learned out of 22 students only 1 was left handed and 21 were right handed.  We talked about how most of the class is right handed and the fewest was left handed (Lauren and I are also left handed but we weren't included in the survey:)

In science, we continue to learn about solids.  This week, Mrs. Pollock, Mrs. Elrick and I will be combining our classes to do some solids science experiments.  In years past, the children have really enjoyed working with friends from the other classes.

We have begun learning about Martin Luther King and this will be what many of our activities revolve around this week in preparation for our no school day on 1/16.

As always, if you have any questions or concerns, feel free to email me at hherring@email.medfield.net

Thank you,
Heather