Owl Week

This week we had a new classmate join our group! We're excited to have a new friend, and to help show him all about our classroom. Now we have 8 boys in room 113!

In our social skills lessons we are working on how to tune out distractions. There are distractions all around us at school, so we are learning about which things to focus on and which things to ignore. The coping skill, "self talk" is a good one for this - we can tell ourselves that we need to focus on the teacher or our work and we need to ignore the other sounds. The boys are working hard at building their stamina for focusing on the right things. They understand that they need to get their bodies calm in order to focus.

Have you heard about our brag tags? We each have a necklace and we work to earn special tags and beads to put on our necklaces. We've earned tags for looking and listening, for assembly behavior, for being reading wizards and for our hallway behavior. We even earned a bead on school picture day! We are pretty proud of our tags!

This week is all about owls! We are reading both fiction and non-fiction owl books, recording our new learning in special owl books, and creating owls for our classroom. On Thursday we will each dissect an owl pellet - we will show you what we find at our Halloween Play on October 29th at 2:00.  Some science words we've used this week include: nocturnal, oviparous talons, habitat, predator and pellet.

Our first Parent Support Group Meeting will be next Wednesday, October 9 from 6:30-7:30 in Room 114 (Mrs. Cohen's room, right next door to ours) I hope that many of you will be able to join us. We plan to discuss how we can work together to help change behaviors that may be problematic for your children. Our meetings are open to all parents, grandparents and caregivers. We talk openly with one another, and without judgement - just support!

Listening and focusing!

This year our classroom has five Chrome Books to learn about and use. We are able to access some great learning games to help us develop our reading and math skills, as well as our keypad skills. We also go into the computer lab on Monday mornings and work with Mr. Stearns - we need to listen and watch when he gives directions so that we can learn these new skills.

Mrs. Schnieders works with us on learning new coping skills, solving problems and developing good ways to express our feelings. She often calls over small groups to the social work table.

This week we continued to talk about how important listening is at school. We practiced ways we can focus our attention and really listen to directions, a story or even another person who is speaking to us. We also learned that we can repeat directions to help remember them - this will help us complete work easily and to know what to do in class.

Next week we will be learning about owls! We will do many science activities, including dissecting owl pellets. We will have our owl projects and our pellet dissection on display after our play on Tuesday, October 29 at 2:00. We hope many of you will be able to join us in our classroom that afternoon.

The permission slips for our field trip to the Outdoor Center on October 23 are coming home. Please fill out the permission slip and send it back. The cost is $5 - our mini-grant is paying for the rest of the cost. Your child will need to wear long pants, closed toe shoes and be dressed for outside that day. Please send a sack lunch for the field trip. We are excited about this trip!

Plants and a Play!

On Monday we arrived to find that many of our seeds had sprouted over the weekend! We know that plants need dirt, air, sun and water to grow. We observed that some of our bigger bean sprouts grew towards the sunny window. We continued to talk about trees and apples - we ended our week by making some wonderful, homemade applesauce.

Our Social Skills lessons were focused on using a coping skill to get work done or when we hear an answer we don't like. A good coping skill for school work is "one step at a time". We can focus on completing one task first before moving on to the next one. We understand that we don't have to get them all done right away, just the one we are working on. Good coping skills to use when we don't hear the answer we like are "deep breathing", "self talk" and  "bump it out" - we can breathe to feel calmer, and then tell ourselves that we can still have fun or have a good day even when everything doesn't go our way. You can create some opportunities for practice at home or model for your child how you might use some of those coping skills to get work done or to handle disappointment when things don't go your way. 

We have been working on a little Halloween play that we plan to present to our families on Tuesday, October 29 at 2:00 in our classroom. We hope that many of you will be able to come! After our play, we'll visit and have donuts and cider.

Miss Marlowe came on Tuesday for our music therapy time. We are happy that she will be with us every week on Tuesday mornings!

 

Plants and seeds and Focusing

We have been learning all about plants and have been busy taking care of the seeds we planted last Friday. We conducted an experiment with food coloring and some Napa cabbage leaves so that we could see how water travels up into the leaves of plants. Ask your child to explain what happened to the leaves.

 We looked at all kinds of seeds and talked about all the different ways that seeds travel. We are also beginning to talk about trees. We are writing much of our science learning in our science notebooks, just like real scientists! Next week we will continue to learn more about trees and read about apples and Johnny Appleseed.

 

In our Social Skills lessons this week we talked about Looking and Listening and then added Thinking about the teacher's words/directions to focus and follow directions. We need this skill to learn new things. Paying attention will help the work be easier because we will know what to do. We were able to earn a Brag Tag for Looking and Listening at Group Time - this is the first tag for our necklaces! We continue to practice and use the Coping Skill of Deep Breathing - ask your child to teach it to you!



We are excited about our upcoming field trip to the Walled Lake Outdoor Center On October 23. Much of this trip and the cost of the bus is being funded through a Foundation for Excellence mini -grant that was awarded to our two EI programs. This mini grant helps us keep the cost of our field trip low - only $5.00. Permission slips will come home closer to the trip. Our class loved our trip there last spring!

Our First Week!

Our first week of school was busy, exciting and fun! We got right back into our school routine with our work folders, our reading groups and our Group Time. Our art/music/PE schedules have not been finalized yet, but we attended all three classes this week.
We reviewed our Group Time behavior expectations and practiced how to sit, listen, look, share and learn at Group Time. This is an important skill for our children to work on - these are the learning skills they will use when they participate in general education classrooms throughout their lives. Our Social Skills lesson was a review and practice of deep breathing, not only as a coping skill, but as a transition strategy to get our minds and bodies ready for the next activity.
We read several books about a bear named Corduroy and a cat named Pete and completed art projects and writing tasks to go along with them.
We also began our first science unit about plants. We examined seeds and planted 2 different kinds of seeds. We wrote in our Science Journals too. We were all very surprised to find a fairy garden near our fairy door -with a note telling us how to take care of our new plants!

 

Your children are all wonderful and I believe we are going to have a great year together. I hope to see you all next Wednesday at 6:30 for Curriculum Night. I have some new things to show you and want to talk about our upcoming field trip!

 

Welcome back to school!

Room 113 is all ready for us to begin the 2013-14 school year! Mrs. Aldrich is returning as one of our para-educators, and Mrs. Couveau will join us as our other para-educator. We will continue to have Mrs. Schnieders as our social worker and Mrs. Williamson as our speech teacher - we think we have a pretty great team, and we are all anxious to work with you and your children this year!
Our Curriculum Night will be on September 11 at 6:30. I hope that many of you will be able to join us -there are some new things in our classroom this year that I will be showing/talking about that evening. We have also scheduled our first Parent Support Group meeting for Wednesday October 9 at 6:30. Our meetings are open to all parents, grandparents or caregivers and serve as a way for us to share ideas and support one another, so please consider joining us.
Just a few quick reminders...your child will bring home a folder each night containing his completed and checked work and his daily note. Please take the completed work out and look it over with your child, and sign and send back the daily note. If you have any questions or concerns or even positive comments, it is fine to add that to the daily note. This is a great way for us to have good home/school communication. It is important that you return the notes because I use them to help me track behavior and progress and to help determine strategies that may better help your child be successful.
I am excited to begin working with your child this fall, and thank you in advance for your help, support and trust! I know that your children are the most important thing in the world to each of you, and they will always be taught with love and patience here. I look forward to our partnership together!

Good-bye friends...Hello summer!

The end of the school year came quickly! We have so many special memories of our school year together, and the friendships we've made here. Last week we finished reading "Charlotte's Web" and spent a lot of time discussing our favorite characters and parts of the story. This week we worked together to clean our desks, take art work down and get the room ready for summer. We finished up our frog life cycle mini unit with some frog floats!

On Wednesday, we had a special celebration to honor our classmates who will be leaving our classroom and will be in Ms. Momeni's classroom next fall. We are proud of all the progress these students have made. We will miss them very much, but know that we will see them next door! We also said "good-bye" to Mrs. Kerrigan, who is retiring and will not be back to school in the fall. We appreciate all of the help and support she has given our class this year, and for many years before!

I wish you all a wonderful, happy summer vacation. I hope you enjoy the slower paced days and extra time to spend with your children. Thank you for sharing them with me this year - it has been wonderful to work with each and every one of them! Sometimes parents wonder what they might do to help support academic skills over the summer. Here are a few ideas:
    * read out loud to your child
    * have a quiet book time each day (we do this daily for about 20 minutes)
    * consider taking your child to the public library
    * help your child write and draw about his/her daily activities (maybe in a journal)
    * play board games with your child
    * ride bikes, go on walks etc. and talk about what you saw
    * have your child work on skills such as counting and naming coins, telling time, and tying shoes
    * work with your child on eating skills - we only are in the lunch room for 20 minutes, and students need to be able to stay seated the whole time,  open the things in their lunch, eat their food in that time frame, and clean up their area.
    * most of all - have fun!