DAY 100 is TOMORROW! I have asked everyone to bring a bag of mini marshmallows for one of the stations that the kids will work at tomorrow. I also asked that they bring 100 pieces of something to add to our Trail Mix. If you have not sent these items please do so TOMORROW 2/1!

We are still collecting items for our holiday basket for KE Fun Night. The goal is to have decorations and other items for each holiday to help make life a little easier on whomever buys our basket. Gift bags, wrapping paper, cards, decorations, candles, towels, linens etc. are all great ideas. We still have Valentine's Day and St. Patrick's Day before our Fun Night is here. Please help our classroom out by providing a few items for our basket. We have a big class so I am hoping we can have a BIG basket! :)

Valentine's Day will be here soon. In your son/daughter's Friday folder there was a paper asking him/her to create a Valentine's Day box to hold their cards and candy in. Please allow them to be as creative as possible. Cereal, Kleenex and shoe boxes work great for this project. Students also wrote their classmates names on the back of their paper so they had a class list for Valentine's cards. (Valentine's are not required but we will take time on February 14 to look at the cards that everyone received and what all of the boxes look like!)

Way to go Ms. Stumpf's class! We read 27, 361 minutes in just 2 weeks! HOORAY! We are celebrating by watching a movie and having a snack on Thursday afternoon. I sent a note home yesterday (or today for a few kiddos) saying they could bring their own snack and drink (water or juice) to enjoy on Thursday afternoon.

This week we have hit the ground running again with money. Yesterday was a very exciting day as we began working with quarters! The kids were SO excited they could hardly concentrate! They said they had been waiting FOREVER to count with quarters! :) We also went back to the clocks today. We reviewed telling time to the quarter hours, half hour and o'clock. As a new concept we filled in the rest of the minutes around the clock and students are now able to look at a clock and tell you what time it is...well almost! We are getting there, the more practice they have the more accurate they will get at telling time!

We are enjoying our new literacy center groups and the books we are reading. Several groups are reading a non fiction title. We are working on picking out IMPORTANT details that help us understand the book. Each day that we read we also write what we found to be important and interesting. While your kids are reading at home continue to ask them questions such as: who were the characters? What was the problem? How did they solve the problem? What was your favorite part? Did this story remind you of anything? Have you ever read a book like this one before? etc...The more of the questions that they can answer the better they are understanding what they are reading.

In Science we are continuing to investigate different type so balls and how they move. Coming later this week we will count the number of bounces a rubber ball has vs. a ping pong ball. We will also see which one is easier to move when we are blowing air out of a straw! Stay posted for pictures to come later this week or early next week from these experiments.