Guided with Love : Week of October 26, 2015

Letter of the Week:

This week we will be working on the letter Zz

Star Word:
my
can

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 are being exposed to forming letters correctly. Each day we will learn a new letter sound. Students will: form the letter at the carpet, on a vertical surface and then in their skills book. With each letter, we will have fun activities dealing with the beginning sound.
Some games are: riddles, I spy, Something That Sounds Like, Guess Who, Minimal Pairs, Finish my sentence...
We will continue blending words every day to gain mastery in this area.
Letters that we will be forming this week are:
o, c, g, i
Each day we practice blending & segmenting words.

Words students should be able to read and write are:
did, tag, tad, mad, dad, did, dim, it, at, cat, mat, dig, dog...

Centers

Writing & Reading

During Writing Workshop we will discuss how to sound out our words when we are spelling. We can't just sound out our word once, we have to keep sounding/ stretching it out until we can hear all of the sounds in our word. We practiced writing leaf, pumpkin, family, sister, brother...
*Students continued adding details to our pumpkin writing from Monday.

During our reading center, students made a Halloween Counting book and illustrated each page. We now have 5 books that we have made ourselves in our book box- along with a few other texts that we have from my book bins. Each day students were able to read their books. All students are being expected to hunt for star words wherever they go. They can find star words in bigger words, on boxes, around the school, in books, on signs... It is important that students can fluently read their star words and not have to sound them out. These words that we learn should become automatic, and we are practicing this in class each day. As for the words that have not been taught, we are learning how to sound out words in our Skills program. We then use authentic text from our book box to become experts at this.

As always, reading at home every night is encouraged.
Thank you!

Math

This week students are working on adding 1 more to a number.
We are drawing 1 more with a group of objects and we are also drawing a group of objects that are 1 more than a given numeral.
We've been playing a lot of hand and dice games. The students are getting good at using their fingers to show 1 more.

Plants

In our Listening and Speaking Domain we are finishing up our Plant domain.
This week we will discuss how plants are useful to people and we will learn about George Washington Carver (botanist). In our centers, we quizzed students on their knowledge of plants with a "Climb the Stem" game. On Thursday we will play Jeopardy with students. Each table will pick one student to be the "Eggspert" and we will see which team knows more about plants. On Friday morning we will have a quick test on what we have learned about plants.

Vocabulary your child has been introduced to:

roots, stem, leaves, flower/blossom, photosynthesis, pollen, nectar, pollination, life cycle, seed, seedling, mature, decay, nutrients, produce, fruit, Johnny Appleseed, hero, orchard, scrumptious, deciduous, bare, dormant, sheds, habitat, evergreen, cones, needles, conifers, bouquet, lumberjack, oxygen, provide, botanist, canvas and crops.

We do not expect students to master all of this vocabulary, but it is important that they are exposed to this language. They will now have the prior knowledge that is necessary to gain mastery in future grade levels.

Jack's mom came in on Tuesday to read a book. After she read to the class, the kids had a delicious Halloween themed snack.

On Friday we will have our annual Halloween Parade!
If you want to help your child get dressed for the parade, come to the school at 1:40. You will need to wait in the lobby until parents are allowed in the classroom.