Crittenden's Critters
Weekly Updates from Room F7
Dates to Remember
*Wednesday, February 10 - Mother-Son Dance
*Thursday, February 11 - Father-Daughter Dance
*Friday, February 12- Classroom Valentine's Day Party
*Monday, February 15- Friday, February 19- Mid-Winter Break
*Saturday, February 27 - CEF Annual Dinner and Auction
*Wednesday, March 2 - Seuss Day!! (More Info to Come)
*Friday, March 4- Spirit Day: Disney Day!
*Saturday, March 5 - Creekside Geckos run Chelsea's Run 5K in Balboa Park
*Monday, March 7 - March 18 - Pasta for Pennies
Closed Syllable Sort
100th Day Fun!
Sea World Adventures
Tweet Tweet - Our Class Twitter Page is Back!
Check us out here!
Mother-Son and Father-Daughter Dances
Our Mother-Son dance is Wednesday, February 10th from 6:30-8:30 PM. Our Father-Daughter dance is Thursday, February 11th from 6:30-8:30 PM.
We need your help to make these nights memorable. Please consider volunteering for one or both events. We guarantee that you will have fun!
To sign up to volunteer for the Mother-Son dance: https://www.volunteersignup.org/EDJ7K
To sign up to volunteer for the Father-Daughter dance: https://www.volunteersignup.org/4QQAP
Valentine's Day Party
It will be a fun time for all. Please send in a wrapped shoe box on the day of the party to decorate and hold their Valentines! If you would like to volunteer for the party, please check out our Shutterfly site to sign up!
To help with addressing Valentines, I have included a link to a Google Doc with a list of names of all of the children in our classroom for reference. You can find this link here.
Let me know if you have any questions about the party! I know the kids are looking forward to it :).
Mystery Readers Wanted!
We have loved having parents, grandparents, and our principal come to read to us! Please help us fill the remaining spots for our Mystery Reader activity for the year! We usually do our Mystery Reader on Friday afternoons around 3:05, but if another day or another time works for you, please let me know! Our schedule is flexible :)
Please help us continue this activity by clicking HERE to sign up to be a Mystery Reader in our classroom!
Annual CEF Dinner and Auction at the MCAS Miramar Officer's Club!
Please join us for a night of food, great company and amazing auction items! The auction directly benefits Creekside Elementary! There will be both live and silent auction items. Miss Crittenden will have a Teacher Time auction item. Students can win a special teacher time activity with Miss Crittenden. The theme is 80's glam. Please refer to the white packet that you received in last Friday's Friday Folders. If you did not receive a packet, please email me ASAP so that I can get you the forms. I cannot wait to see everyone there to help raise money for our amazing school!
Weekly Curriculum Update
Foundational: This next week, we will be continuing to learn about the closed syllable and how it affects how a word sounds and is spelled. The kids have really grasped this concept quickly and are able to distinguish between closed syllable words and non-closed syllable words. There are actually six different syllable types, but closed syllables are going to the only ones we focus on for now. Looking ahead, we will be learning about closed syllables that have more than five sounds. This affects how students tap the words to decode them. After the children have a solid understanding of closed one syllable words with up to five sounds, we will begin to learn about basic, closed, multi-syllabic words (words with more than one syllable).
Literature: We will be continuing to notice and discuss how a character changes throughout the story and character feelings. We will also be reviewing how important it is to find evidence in the text that answers questions about that text. We will be reviewing retell of the story and how to distinguish the most important ideas from small details in a story. In non-fiction, we will be reviewing asking and answering questions about a text.
WRITING-
Wow! I have been so impressed with the kids' writing! They are eager to get their ideas down on paper and often get upset when it is time to move on from writing to another subject! We have been working on opinion writing this month. Students have been working on forming an opinion about a subject, stating their opinion in writing, providing reasons for their opinion, and giving a closing sentence to end the piece. This week we started to talk about a president and why they are important to our country. We had a writing assignment where they wrote about one law that they would put into motion if they were President of the United States. They had to write about how their law would help the people in the US. They came up with so many good laws and reasons! We went back and looked at older opinion pieces, and checked them for the writing conventions that we have been learning (capitalization, punctuation, and cohesiveness). This coming week, we will be continuing our opinion writing and editing our pieces to check for conventions, organization, and sentence fluency.
MATH-
Number Talks: I am very excited about a new strategy that I am implementing during our whole class Number Talks meetings. During these meetings, we focus on computation, patterns, counting, and place value. Students learned new sign language that lets me know whether they are working on a problem, or if they have come up with an answer to the problem. Each student can defend their answer by explaining how they got their answer and what math strategies they used to come to that answer. This will help to solidify their understanding of the strategies that they are using, and also get them used to talking about their thought processes when working through math!
Cubs: The cubs will be working with Ms. Otto next week on reinforcing their understanding of groups of tens and ones. They will also be reviewing counting, shape attributes, and counting on.
Bears: Bears will be working on adding and subtracting groups of tens and ones (two digits and one digit). They will also be working on mentally finding ten more or ten less than any number from 1-120. We will be reviewing strategies that we learned to find unknown addends in number problems and word problems.
SOCIAL STUDIES-
February will be a social studies rich themed month, and I am very excited about it. We will be reviewing some of the words that we learned at the beginning of the year (diversity and culture), and we will be looking at how those two concepts play a role in our classroom, community, and country. We will also be looking at change and how groups of people, communities, and our country have changed over time. We will learn about President's Day, who we celebrate with the day, and why we celebrate it. We will be celebrating Black History Month by looking at some of the African American leaders (past and present) of our country's history and how they have shaped our country. We will also be focusing on the idea of friendship and kindness and how important it is to show kindness every day.
SCIENCE-
I am really excited about our topics in February for science. We will be covering Earth's place in the universe. Towards the end of the month, we will use observations of the sun, moon, and stars to describe patterns that can be predicted. We will also make observations at different times of year to relate the amount of daylight to the time of year. The kids are usually fascinated with this topic, and I know it will be a fun concept for them to learn.
Have A Question? Contact Me!
Email: scrittenden@powayusd.com
Location: 12362 Springhurst Drive, San Diego, CA, United States
Phone: (858) 391-2607
Twitter: @miss_crittenden