Insect Explorations

Good afternoon CFI families!

I hope you had a great break from school last week and that you did not suffer any damage from the hurricane. I know a few lost power and the kids saw several trees down around them but they seemed excited to be back at school with their friends. This has been a weird two weeks hasn’t it! They have flown by with all these days off of school and we are trying our best to get back into a regular flow. My birthday brought with it many hugs, lots of “happy birthdays” and a few cards. It was so very special to be able to celebrate it with them.

So sorry curriculum night was canceled but it has been rescheduled, albeit with little notice, for this week on Thursday the 20th. We will be sharing about math in our classroom and providing you with a resource for at home reading. The next day for our gathering we will be sharing about insects. Together these will allow you to glimpse inside the great learning happening in our classroom.

In terms of insects, they are all over the classroom displayed through your children’s artwork, books, and specimens in the science center. They made great illustrations with Mrs. Watkins in art to complement the sketches they have done with me and these are going up all over the room. We also got to look at hercules and rhino beetles that Mrs. Smith found in her garden and brought in for us to look at. They are quite scary looking! We also have one cricket who survived the sudden departure of the CFI staff but Mr. O’keefe came as a guest scientist and brought us many new creatures to observe. He shared with us how his class has also been looking at insects and said he was very impressed with what our class had already learned. This week we will be collecting data on insects we see and will extend insects into our math curriculum. Look forward to seeing more about insects in our gathering.

In math we are just starting to look at solving addition problems where we know the answer and one addend but not the other. For example 5+_=7. This has challenged us to look at the relationship between addition and subtraction, broadening our mathematical understanding. We have also been working on patterns in counting and in skip counting. This helps us when we go to add and in the future multiply looking at adding on by the same number in a group each time. In our math rotations we have been representing numbers on a place value chart, solving word problems together, and arranging the numbers 1-50 in the correct order. I look forward to showing you all this on Thursday night!

In reading and writing we have been looking at punctuation and what its purpose is. We have been reading big books together practicing strategies to figure out unknown words, sounding them out, and reading fluently. We read In the Tall Tall Grass where we found all the insects hiding in the grass and sounded out some very difficult descriptive words noticing the illustrations and rhyming pattern along the way. They are pointing out to each other ways they notice authors captivating their attention with text. For example in Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! the words become bigger, darker, and with exclamation marks to demonstrate the Pigeon’s frustration at not being allowed to drive the bus. They are finding examples of this in books they read independently and I’ve seen it in some of their writing during independent writing time. This demonstrates the exciting growth I’ve seen in their writing as they have patterned things we have seen other authors do. I look forward to seeing more examples of this. Here are some dates for now but I look forward to sharing more through our upcoming events.

So many author shares!

School and Class Information:

October 20th- Rescheduled Curriculum night at the same time

Sandhills Library Trip- This Friday (October 21st). Please if you have not sent in a library card send these in as soon as possible.

October 21st- Our gathering at 2:20

October 21st- Picture forms and payment need to be returned

October 22nd- Parent surveys for the school are due. More information is provided in center connections

October 28th- CFI’s fall festival at 1:30

Please return Zoo forms even if payment is paid online so that we know about chaperoning and lunch counts

November 4th- The school Zoo trip

November 11th- Grand Day and Veteran’s Day at CFI

November 11th- CFI’s family movie night at 7:00pm

Home to school connections-

Please continue the reading logs and have your child fill in the form. It also does not need to be a new book every night. By this I mean I love seeing children reread books because these second looks provide so much more than the first exposure. Instead of just trying to read the story, children are more attuned to what happened and that comprehension component we want them to have. Ask questions like what happened at the beginning, middle, and end. Or, how do you think the main character felt when that happened?

This week we will be collecting data about insects we see outside and figuring out ways we can document that data (graphs, tallies…) So, I ask that you ask your child to do this at home. Go outside, find what insects you can and either sketch or document observations and try to take quantitative notes on what they see around them.

Looking forward to a great week living and learning together and I hope to see many of you though the many activities we have going on at the center in the coming weeks!

I am including the link to the special area teachers’ blogs so that you can follow what they are doing in their special area times.

Art- http://watkins-cfi.blogspot.com/

PE- https://cfipe.wordpress.com/

Music- https://sites.google.com/a/richland2.org/cfi-music/