Dear Families, I cut and pasted the letter about the stem unit at the bottom of this email to be more paper friendly 🙂
 Here is a link for the food program.  You can fill it out online if you haven’t done it yet. https://www.myschoolapps.com/ I will send the Seesaw codes in Thursday folders.  I’m hoping to send out some pictures on Friday.  Thanks for your patience, I’m excited for you to see what we are doing in action and to implement Seesaw. We learned a Robot Dance last week called Left and Right Robot.  You can view it here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e9MLhGmyPko . The students love it!  We will learn and practice lots of dances over the year.  Being able to make your body move in a prescribed way is important for gross motor skills.  Practicing the same dance is also a way to train your memory. Our centers are full of robot materials (building a robot with snap bots, water coloring robots,  making a shape robot, building a robot out of Play Doh, and reading stories about robots and the 5 senses. We went to the Bot Spot today to investigate coding robots to move!  It was so exciting!  Ask your student about it! For our greeting song, students have been choosing a cat or a dog stuffed animal and we have been singing, “Kitty Cat, Kitty Cat, 1,2,3, will you say your name for me?”  “Let’s clap it.”  (We clap the syllables in the student’s name.) . “Let’s whisper it!”  If the student picks the dog then we sing, “Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, 1,2,3.”  I have paired this song with our Fundations curriculum which uses a cat and a dog to teach the letters “C” and “D.”  I also used this opportunity to have students pick the choice, “I like cats” or “I like dogs” on our pocket chart.  I used a cat and dog picture next to the word to help students read the word.  I have used the sentence starter, “I like” many times already so students are familiar, we read it to them, or they ask a friend.  This is a great way for me to get some individual literacy time with students.  I work to give students multiple times to practice the same concept for learning and growth.   For math we have been rolling a number cube, naming the number, and quantifying that number with counters. If you are able to donate stickers, ribbon, or fabric scraps we would be happy to use them!  If you are going to buy stickers, I really like to use stickers in the classroom as a way to talk about literacy.  (Dogs, horses, frogs, rainbows, stars, basically any picture of a noun.)   That said, we are grateful for anything 🙂 I am excited to meet with families at conferences!  If you need to change your time I am happy to accommodate you.  Please call me or email me so that we can work through our schedules together.  Over the next week, you might think of questions or goals you have for your students.  I look forward for this opportunity to talk with you about these.  My goals for students are that he/she-wants to come to school-feels anchored to the learning space-is learning new skillsThis will be my agenda for our conferences. 

We are beginning our next STEM unit on Robotics. We have noticed that children get excited to play with technology and think robots are cool. Children are curious about how things work, including robots. Please let us know if someone in your family works in a job related to technology, programming, or robotics and would like to share his or her expertise with the class. We would love to arrange a time for them to join us in our investigations. 

In this unit we have some main focuses:

• What are our five senses and how do we use them to explore our  world? 

• How do senses help a robot know what to do?

• What can robots be programmed to do?  

• Where do we see robots in our environment, how do they help us?

 

As we study Robotics, we will learn concepts and skills in social studies, science, literacy, math, the arts, and technology. We will also be developing thinking skills to observe, investigate, ask questions, solve problems, make predictions and test our ideas.  

 

What You Can Do at Home

• Reading books on MyOn about Robotics

• Talk about the different things you have to program to make work (ex. Microwave- you tell it how much time to cook)

• Play “Program-A-Person!” Tell your child how many steps to take forward, backward, to the side, turn around, etc.

Some Activities We Have Planned

• Talking about our five senses and how robots have senses, too! 

• Programming Bee Bot, Dot and Dash, Code-A-Pillar, and more.

• Writing about what we would program a robot to do for us.

• Using emergent reading skills to read predictable books about robots

• Building robots with materials in our classrooms

 

Thanks for playing an important role in our learning!

 Thank you for bringing your student to school everyday!  We are so grateful to get to spend our day with your child!  With our very best,Mary and Sherry