Saturday, January 8, 2011

Welcome Back, Bear Cam, and more!

Our first week back together was great. The children slid right back into the school routine. Though by Friday we were all thankful it was finally "Fun Friday".

In reading this week the children started working on a few new skills. One of these is phoneme segmentation. That's fancy for stretching out a word to hear the sounds in it. For example if I say "cat" you say /c/ /a/ /t/ (the sounds). Why is this important you ask? In order to become a writer the children must first be able to separate the words into their individual sounds before they are able to write the word on paper. This is a new skill so we are working on two and three sound words.

We already started applying this "stretching out" skill to our writing. This week the children were able to write in their notebooks two times. Once they were able to draw an animal and try labeling it with the word. The other time they wrote a whole sentence! I can _____. They wrote what they could do on their own, drew a picture, and even revised their work to make sure it made sense!

We have started working on a new counting skill in math as well; counting by 5s. We've just begun to learn, but please begin practicing this at home as well. Don't forget to help your child count by 1s to 115 too! Addition using pictures and manipulatives will also be incorporated into our math skills.

Back in November the children learned about a very special bear named Lily. Perhaps you know about her too! She's a radio collared bear that provides information about black bears to the North American Bear Center in Ely, MN. Last year they installed a camera in her den and the whole world was able to watch her bring her cub Hope into the world.

This year they have again installed a den camera at Lily's den where she is hibernating with her yearling Hope. Researchers believe that Lily will give birth again this year. The plan was to follow the den camera at school, but we are currently have some technical issues getting it to load on our computers. I encourage you to follow Lily at home with your child. The link to the den camera and the North American Bear Center site is available on my web page.
Photos, videos, and updates are posted daily on both Facebook and at the North American Bear Center web site.

I followed Lily last year at home with my own children and never thought they would be fighting over who got to sit in the office chair to watch live video of sleeping bears in hopes they would get a glimpse of the new baby!

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