Week of October 12, 2015

Letter of the Week:  

This week we will be working on the letter Nn.

Star Word: 

this   

is 

The star word and the letter person worksheet were sent home on Monday in your child's red folder.

 Skills  

In our Skills curriculum, students continued to work on blending sounds, listening for beginning sounds, played with the "mixed-up dinosaur", wrote their first and last name, and practiced drawing wavy lines, humps, cups, canes and hooks on a vertical surface and in their skills book.

At home: Try playing 'I spy' with your child. 

This is the way we play at school: I say, "I spy with my little eye, something that sounds like this... c-u-p. I sound out the word, and the students have to blend my sounds to make the word. They really enjoy playing this game! If you want to challenge your child, see if they can be the "teacher" for the "I Spy" game. That way they can start sounding out words (segmenting) for you to find! Or, you can sound out a word with more than 4 sounds as another challenge.

Happy blending!! 

Writing 

During Writing Workshop we are trying to get a lot of details in our picture. Students are then being asked to say what their picture is about and write those words on their paper to the best of their ability. This is a very difficult task because many students are not yet able to segment words on their own. To segment a word means to say the word by separating every sound in the word. When I play "I Spy" with the kids I need to segment the word, and the kids blend the sounds to make the words. We have been sitting with each child and segmenting words for them and some students are able to do this on their own. We will continue using our alphabet book to help write our sounds. If you want a copy of our ABC book, please let me know and I'll get it to you ASAP! :)

Reading 

This week we made 2 books to put in our book box and students were also given 2 authentic texts as well. Students are working on pointing to each word and reading the word that they are pointing to- "Voice print match". In centers we worked on sounding out three sound words and reading our star words fluently. Mrs. Chernis and I were very impressed with the reading we saw/heard this week!  

We will continue to read in school everyday but it is very important that every child is reading/being read to at home as well.

Thank you!

Centers 

During this period, I work with a group of students in a small group while other students work independently at differentiated centers. My lessons focus on what the group of children in front of me need. It can be very different for each group! Below are pictures of two of the many centers we had this week. Next week I will try and post more pictures!

Star Word Hunt 

On Thursday we went on a Star Word Hunt in our courtyard. It was so much fun! All of the kids were so excited to see our star words hanging all over the place. They were running and calling out star words the entire time. As we were leaving to go back to class, everyone was still talking about all of the words they found, and how many times they found it. Pretty awesome! Below are a few pictures from our word hunt:

Math  

In math we have learned about numbers 0-9 and how to form each of them. Everyday next week we will continue to practice forming each of the numbers we have learned so that all students are confident and can go on to bigger numbers. As we learned numbers 6, 7, 8, and 9, students were asked to put a certain number of objects in: a line, a circle, scattered formation, and an array. Students also practiced coloring 5 of their objects in one color and the rest of the objects in another color. With math, you will notice a lot of work with "5". We want the kids to start thinking about numbers as 5 and some more. For example, 7 is the same as 5 and 2 more. We draw a lot of 5-groups in class and the groups help students to see 5. We also use our fingers a lot because we have 5 fingers on one hand and we can add on more with our other hand.

 Plants 

In our Listening and Speaking Domain we continued to learn about plants. So far, we pretended to be a plant growing from a seed, a plant decaying because it was too old, roots holding a plant in the ground, a bee pollinating flowers, a leaf making food (photosynthesis) and roots drinking water and taking in nutrients.  On Tuesday we took apart a plant so that we could study the roots, and all of the parts of the plant. We compared seeds of different fruits. On Friday we put our finger into the middle of a flower and got yellow pollen all over our finger and then we touched a white piece of paper and spoke about how pollen can spread, students then had a discussion about pollination. 

Vocabulary your child has been introduced to: 

roots, stem, leaves, flower/blossom, photosynthesis, pollen, nectar, pollination, life cycle, seed, seedling, mature, decay and nutrients. 

Town Meeting 

This week we had a Town Meeting for grades K-4. Bucket Fillers were announced at that time and the recipients for the month of September are:

Mia

Jared

Jack

Simona

 Congratulations!!!!

 

There is no school: 

Monday, October 12th, 2015

Thank you for visiting our blog!