What a week! I can't believe we missed Valentine's Day at school :) Not to worry we will celebrate on Monday the 24th. I will provide the snack and activity for our mini-celebration on Monday! I have tried to attach the bookworm info to the bottom of this e-mail. The notice went out this week and is in the students mailboxes! It is a great publication. I will be encouraging the students to participate! We did get to start our CENTERS this week. The children LOVED it. We will build on our activities when we return after break. Centers allow the students to move at their pace and level through our daily literacy activities. I am also able to meet with small groups and individual students at this time! Informational writing will be in full swing when we return after break. We brainstormed lists of topics we know a lot about and had some free write time this week to get our brains going! The children really enjoyed the time to do a "try-it" with informational writing. We have come to the end of chapter 7 in math. We have been practicing how to make numbers 11-19. We have also been using our 100's chart to count by 2's 5's and 10's. Any practice with skip counting at home would be helpful. When we return we will do a quick review of the chapter! Since we were unable to take a spelling test on Friday, we will have the test on Monday when we return. We will also have the pre-test for our new pattern ai, ay. We practice our spelling words during centers everyday! We earned a dance party this week and the class LOVED it! I was so thrilled to see the class dancing together and having a good time. What a great group of dancers we have!!! See the pictures below! I recorded some of our Valentine songs! I hope you will be able to see them when I upload! Cross your fingers! St. Patrick's Day: looking ahead I plan to have a celebration in the classroom on March 17th that parents are invited to. It will begin at 10:30! Again, we will celebrate Valentine's Day on the 24th when we return to school. If your child was planning to bring in Valentine cards, please send them MONDAY!! Enjoy the break! Looks like the temperatures will be headed up! Just in time for out thermometer work in Science!!! Enjoy! Mrs. Fronheiser BOOKWORM The art and literature magazine of Slingerlands Elementary School Calling all writers and artists! We are now accepting your submissions of creative as well as non-fiction writing pieces and artwork for Bookworm 2014! Get inspired as you watch the upcoming Winter Olympics and enter your artwork for the cover based on this year’s cover theme: OLYMPICS. There is no theme for other submissions and any topic can be chosen for written or art pieces. All submissions should include the student’s name, grade, and teacher. Leave submissions in the BOOKWORM box at the school library Grades K – 1 Sue Baker susanbaker@kw.com Or email submissions to Grades 2 – 3 Ingrid Sorensen sorengrid@gmail.com Grades 4 - 5 Shalini Verma shalini890@yahoo.com DEADLINE: Friday, March 14 Writing • No longer than one typed page (digital submission via email preferred) • Pieces can be fiction or non-fiction • Fiction ideas: Short stories or poems • Non-fiction ideas: Interview a school staff member or a community helper. Write about why they chose their profession, what they like about their

Wow! We made it to Friday! What a fun week here in first grade. The children were wonderful. We played many getting to know you games this week. The most popular was the toilet paper game where each student took some toilet paper off the roll and had to tell us something about themselves for each square they took! They thought this was so funny! I enjoyed learning about favorite foods, and family members! When the kids came in on Monday they found their new islands! We are now at tables of four and they seem to be enjoying their new table mates. We have also been listening to soft music in the mornings as the kids unpack! We have been practicing long U this week and adding some unique words to our anchor chart. We will have a long vowel review next week. Many of the spelling words may be repeats that need to be practiced again! In math, we have been working on making and using numbers 11-19 and counting by tens. We have been using the foamy ten frames to count by tens for practice. We have also been beginning to talk about skip counting on a number chart. We will continue this topic into next week! I have really enjoyed watching everyone get excited about our quiet sustained reading time. We have talked about finding a comfortable quiet spot in the room to read. We have been listening to quiet music during this time and the kids really seem to enjoy it! Our buddies came in to work on a groundhog puppet and poem on Friday! We love when our buddies come! Next week we will work on Valentine cards for them. Thank you so much to our Guest readers this week, Mrs. Collette, Mr. Meyer and Mr. Stein. It is really wonderful to have so many parents as guest readers! In writing this week, we worked on continuing our writing. We explored writing for a longer length of time! I was thrilled with so many students diving into their writing journals. Next week we will jump right in with informational writing! Today, I sent home a list of students in our class for Valentines! Please make sure to send one in for every student if you will be making them! We will work on a mailbox next week so we are ready to deliver! You may send in Valentines any time! We also had many students participate in the Science Fair this week! The projects were awesome! Thanks to all the parents who put in so much time and energy! Enjoy the snow this weekend and stay warm! Jane NEW E-Mail: jfronheiser@bcsd.neric.org