Safety Week

This week at Rowe, all the children attended two presentations: one about bike safety, and one about railroad safety.  The children learned a lot of safety information from both presentations.  Ask your child to tell you what he/she learned.

On Thursday, we were lucky to have Alexander's mom, Ms. Scammell, teach us about the Netherlands (where she is from and where Alexander lived for a period of time).  The children were very engaged during this presentation and learned many interesting facts about the Netherlands.  Thank you, Ms. Scammell, for providing the children with this learning opportunity.

During Writing Workshop, we began wrapping up our poetry unit (we will finish on Monday).  The children loved this unit.  I was so impressed by the poetic voices of these children!  For the remainder of the year, we will be writing across genres (student choice) and doing some scientific writing to connect with our ocean unit.

During Math we have been working on addition and subtraction fluency, number stories and number models, graphing, and thinking of equivalent names for numbers.  Below is a snapshot of this week's math stations.

During Reading Workshop we have been working on paying attention to punctuation and reading like the punctuation tells us to read.  We have worked on improving our reading fluency and expression by rereading our books with a focus on sounding more fluent each time we read.  We have also been focusing on checking for understanding as we are reading.

Have a nice weekend!
Katie 

Ocean Life

On Tuesday, the children had the opportunity to observe life from the ocean's intertidal zone.  Coastal Carol Steingart, a marine science educator, brought ocean life to Rowe School!  The children loved this hands-on encounter.  It was a great kick-off to our ocean unit!  Here is a glimpse of what the children observed.
 

Arbor Day Celebration

On Friday, the Kindergarten classes went to Estabrook's Nursery to celebrate Arbor Day.  In addition to learning about invasive tree pests, the children got to build fairy houses!  This was the highlight of their morning.  Congratulations to our very own Avi, whose design was printed on the Arbor Day t-shirts!!

Back in the classroom, we have spent time learning to compare and contrast characters between stories.  We read several books with the same characters and compared and contrasted the adventures of those characters between stories.  We also read stories with different characters and compared and contrasted those characters and their adventures.

During Writing Workshop, we shared our published All-About books with our classmates and our first grade reading buddies.  The children are very proud of their work, as they should be!  You will be able to read these books, along with many other pieces of writing, in a few weeks during portfolio night (information will be coming home soon).  We are now working on a mini small-moment unit and will switch gears to poetry writing  in a few days (although many children are already writing poems during their free time!).

During Math we:

• spent time learning about the dollar bill.   We learned different combinations of coins that are equivalent to one dollar and played a dollar exchange game.  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• learned about both the hour and minute hands on a clock and practiced showing times to the hour and half-hour. 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
• have been practicing subtraction and strategies for solving subtraction facts.
• practiced telling and solving number stories.
• have worked on showing equivalent names for numbers.
• worked on reading and finding two-digit numbers on a number grid.

I hope you enjoyed the beautiful weekend!
Best,
Katie