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Dear families,
With the onset of spring comes the promise of warm rainstorms, blossoming flowers, picnics in the park, and the inevitable rise of that most reviled New York houseguest, the insect. While our many legged friends may get a bad rap, for the next two weeks the 3's Club students will be 'bugging out'.
Our language unit begins with a focus on identifying consonants and blends in the book I Saw an Ant. Each student will receive an index card flip book that will help them spot the consonants (B, S, J, P, T) and blends (BL, SH, SN, TR, CL, WH) throughout the story. This simple, interactive tool links the concept of a rhyme to the subunits of language and can be added to or amended as your child's vocabulary grows.
We will also introduce a series of fun and active onomatopoeic vocabulary words (a word that imitates or suggests the source of the sound that it describes: chirped, whizzed, crunched, bubbled, screeched, hummed, whirred, buzzed) when we read Eric Carle's The Very Quiet Cricket. Students get to create their own bug book with our collection of bug stamps, labeling each bug with at least the first letter of its name.
Our classroom is transformed into a laboratory of entomologists as each student will get to examine our collection of live bugs with the magnifying glass we introduced last week. Children will be asked to identify differences in each bug's size, shape, number of legs, and manner of movement before we move on to our specific social study of the common carpenter ant.
Ant colonies are a wonderful example of hard work and community. After discussing the physical structure of the anthill, we will explore the social structure of the colony, including the workers, the queen and their common goal. Our very own 'worker ants' will then have to collect the 'pebbles' in our classroom to create the anthill home for our ant colony.
Throughout the curriculum, our activities will be underscored by the famous song, The Ants Go Marching (a fun tool for counting and basic addition/subtraction practice). Though we start at five and work backwards to one, students will be challenged to start at fifteen and higher with the prompt, 'what is one less ant?' This focus on five continues with a one-to-one correspondence game, Show Me Five, where students are asked to identify different sets of five in a variety of arrangements (i.e. five buttons arranged in a circle, then the same five buttons arranged in a row of three and a row of two). This recognition is the foundation for most basic math skills and we hope you are able to incorporate counting/one-to-one correspondence practice into everyday life.
After all, it is important to bridge the gap between school and home as we all know that a child's development does not stop when he or she leaves the classroom. We encourage you to use the take home materials, songs, and games your child learns with us to celebrate learning in any setting.
Warm Regards,
Gair Morris
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