Mrs. Chabot’s
Spring News

We are in the midst of our dinosaur unit and we are having so much fun integrating math, science and language skills into this theme.  We made a stained glass window using transparencies to display the different dinosaurs that lived in the Jurassic, Triassic and Cretaceous periods. We will be rotating classrooms soon with Mrs. Rindfleisch, Mrs. Stewart and Mrs. Taylor’s classes and creating flying pterodactyls, clay dinosaurs, volcanoes and dioramas! We will be having a Dinosaur Day on Friday, April 11th from 9:15-10:45 and we would love it if you could join us.  We will be sharing our dinosaur reports, our dioramas, stories and some research we have been doing.  We will also be reciting some dino songs and poems.  Remember to send in a shoe box and a white T-shirt as soon as possible for some of our special projects. A friend of mine, Elise Bohner, is a language specialist who used to work for the Madison schools and she is doing some graduate work.  To fulfill one of her requirements she is coming into our classroom and doing some reading and spelling activities with the children.  She is a wealth of knowledge and we are very fortunate to have her working with our class.  She will be giving a short presentation to you at the beginning of our Dino day to let you know what she has been doing.

In math we have been continuing our work with fact families (3+4=7, 4+3=7, 7-4=3, 7-3=4, doubles (3+3, 4+4...) and doubles plus one and two.  We are using base ten blocks to learn about place value and we had a great time doing Pocket Math for a week.  Every day each child put a unifix cube in each of their pockets.  They then hooked them together and talked to their classmates to create trains of ten.  We place them on a large place value mat and by the end of the week we had 114 pockets!

In our phonics program we are working on word families and concentrating on the following letter combinations; aw, au, ow, oa, oo, ew and ue.

We have been spending a lot of time on our reading strategies and I am sending home another copy in case you have misplaced the one I sent back in September.  It would be great if you could reinforce these strategies at home.  We are also using Nancy Boyles comprehension strategies every day.  These are Guessing what the story is about by looking at the pictures, Noticing what the important clues are, making Connections to your own life, Wondering what might happen next, Picturing the event in your mind and Figuring Out what the book is all about.

Denise and Allison

* We are in need of supplies for our art center
(pom poms, pipe cleaners, beads, foam shapes…)