Thanks to those of you who returned the coupon books and/or money today. I'm still missing a few, but I'm sure everything will be taken care of in the next day or two. Three new things happened today. First, half of the students had jobs today. Jobs include lunch basket carrier, messenger, chair stacker, library basket carrier, snack helper, and calendar helper. Students who don't have a job this week will have one next week. I rotate them so that everyone will have an opportunity to try out all of the jobs. Second, students checked in this morning by putting their name and picture into a pocket chart. Third, students who have had their hand stamped 10 times got a prize from the prize jar. I have been keeping track on my clipboard, but I think I'll hang up a poster so that students can track their progress and see how many days until they can get a prize.

For our letter O day, students listened to words to determine if they had the short or long O sound in them. We have talked about vowels and have learned a song that introduces the 2 sounds made by vowels, but it may be a while before they understand this concept. During snack, we watched a short National Geographic video about an octopus attacking a shark. Who knew they were so powerful?!

In math, we made movement patterns (clap, stomp, clap, stomp, clap, stomp=an AB pattern). We also looked at the various kinds of graphs and students drew pictures of themselves to create a picture graph of boys versus girls. We discovered that there are more girls than boys. During writer's workshop, students were asked to turn letter Os into something else. Some students got really creative and drew pizzas, cookies, steering wheels, lollipops, faces, etc. Students also colored an octopus and glued a poem onto the back. If your child didn't have time in class, tonight you could have them underline the Os in the poem.

Tomorrow is library day. Please return books in the morning. Also, please return the bottom portion of last week's newsletter with the hours of reading you or your child have done over the past week. Have a great evening!