Week 10

Play brings joy. And it's vital for problem solving, creativity and relationships.
Margarita Tartakovsky

Checkers...helps to develop on cooperation skills and strategic thinking

Students learned the letter, keyword, and sound for letters d and s this week.  We learned the letter formation using the Fundations writing grid (Sky line, Plane line, Grass Line, Worm line).  We learned three new sight words:  I, can, see, and read a new sight word book titled,  I Can See.

During Writer's workshop, Students are writing true stories and working on revising and adding to our stories.  

Our Readers workshop lessons focused on "Reading the world", and noticing words everywhere we go.  Things like road signs, store signs, and exit signs, or your favorite cereal box, or labels on items.  Words are everywhere we go!   You can help by pointing these out to your child when you are in the car or at the grocery store. 

During our guided reading lessons, students are working on pointing to each word (1 to 1 correspondence), using pictures to help us figure out unknown words, and looking at the letters in the words.  Some students are beginning to say the sounds in words to figure out the word (decoding) while other students may only notice the first letter in the word.  My goal is to meet each students where they are and move them forward.  Some students will move more quickly through this process, while other students may need more time.  Our guided reading lessons allow for this flexibility and grouping students to best meet their needs.  Keep in mind that reading is a long and complicated process.  We can't expect students to just sound out words before they have the skills to do it.  Students are still learning letter sounds and therefore should not be asked to sound out words yet.

In Math we learned about the number 10!  Students worked on counting strategies and  finding the hidden partners in 10.  We begin the idea of Place value by teaching that 10 is ten ones.  When we have ten ones we have one 10 (moving our ten ones to the ten's place ).
We also acted out number stories and used counters to model number stories. A number story may sound like this:  There were 5 bears in a field.  2 were eating berries and 3 were taking a nap.  Students may demonstrate this and tell this story by using two blue cubes and 3 red cubes to model the story.

We explored Force and Motion with our buddies on Friday.  Students worked to explore how various materials create more fiction on a slide.

Announcements:
No School Friday, November 9th.  (Teachers have In Service to work on strengthening PBL)

Thanksgiving Lunch November 14th.  Families are invited to join their Student(s) for Turkey Dinner with all the fixings!  Return the invitation found in your Friday Folder to RSVP.

ECO Friday November 16th.

Thanksgiving Recess NO SCHOOL Nov. 21-23