September 27 Classroom Headlines

Language Arts

This week during Writer's Workshop, we continued to work in our journals by writing personal narratives. The students were encouraged to create detailed pictures and then dictated their stories for me. We're beginning to work on stretching out our words by "pulling" them out of our mouths. Tying in a kenistetic movement, like pulling something apart slowly, helps students understand that they need to stretch out the words they're saying in order to hear all of the sounds in that word. The goal right now is for the students to begin hearing beginning or ending sounds they can write down as their inventive spelling, helping us to get used to writing by ourselves in our journals. 

Our new sight word this week is "the." The students worked on reading the word with our newest book bag book, Setting The Table.This book was put into our browsing bag in the classroom and will be used in the classroom over the coming weeks as one of our "just right books" for the students to read during our Daily 5 time.

We introduced the letters Mm and Nn this week in Fundations. Homework for these letters will be sent home on Tuesday, October 1.

Math

We have finished our first chapter in Math In Focus! We worked with the number 5 this week by counting groups of 5 and writing the numeral 5 in our workbooks.

To tie in with our apple activities this week, we read 10 Apples Up On Top, by Dr. Seuss. The students traced the numerals 1-10 on apples, cut the apples out and then pasted them in order on top of a drawing of their own heads.

Health & Science

We continued to discuss being safe in public by talking about using the Buddy System. We talked a lot about why and when we need to use a buddy to keep safe.

In science, we began using scientific tools, large magnifying squares, outside to observe what was in our square. We then recorded our observations by drawing pictures of what we saw in our squares.

Other News

*We will begin our share calendar this week. Each child will have an opportunity to bring in an object or tell a story that is important to them. I mentioned to the students that when they share these objects or stories that I'll ask three questions - What is it? Where did you get it? and Why is it important to you? The share calendar is now posted on our blog.

*Thank you for offering to volunteer in our classroom! I will begin contacting parents this week with our volunteer schedule for the next few months. My hope is that our volunteers will begin the week of October 7th.