Week of January 30th

Hello from the Red room!

Ms. Heather and I are having so much fun with our students.  We had a great week independently picking out JRL books.  The students are so excited each day to walk to the room and make this choice.  The students are enjoying more independent time with different activities throughout the day.  They are learning how to control their volume, work with friends on sharing, and using time managment when moving from one project to another.  They are very proud of themselves and we are proud of them too!

A big thank you to Miss Ella for assisting us each day after her middle school day is finished!  The students love their older friends and it gives Ms. Heather and I a chance to meet with individual students for more one on one reading/writing time.  Ella also works with small groups on different days for additional work on core skills (rhyming, letter blends/sounds, numbers (writing and recognition).  This added contact time is so helpful for our friends!

ELA -

We continue to have our buddy reading time each Friday morning.  Our kiddos love this time with their mentor friends.  We begin by having a read aloud with all three classes.  This is a fun time where students sit with their friends from other classes.  We even have some fun sibling time too!  After the read aloud, each student picks out his or her just right level book.  They then decide on a spot in the red/yellow room, where they will take turns reading their books to each other.

In our small groups, we had light bulbs popping up all over!  What fun!  We introduced the process of building words and blending sounds.  We looked at beginning, middle, and ending sounds.  We took a word like p/e/n and would take away the p and add a d for d/e/n, etc.  It was fun to see the students sound out the words one by one and eventually just saying the words because they already knew the sounds.  Our students understand there is a beginning and ending sound but often wonder about that middle sound.  This exercise seemed to reach the majority of the students.  Please keep practicing this skill at home with various three letter words.

Writing - In writing this week, many of our friends finished his or her final writing draft.  They then started a new small moment writing piece.  Our whole group activity involved writing a sentence as a class.  We had a list of sight words that were familar to the students.  We then worked together to make the separate words into a sentence that made sense.

Math -

We used the Smartboard for some Math fun.  We built addition problems, presenting them in various forms.  We then used various objects like stars and circles to have the students see how many 10 really is or to see 10 items plus 4 items equal 14 total items.  The students love to make groupings of the items into 10's and 5's.  They are beginning to see how easy it is to count when the items are in order and grouped!  We also worked with partners to have some fun with money.

Social Studies - This week we made a class graph.  We asked the students what responsibilites they have in their lives.  This included home, school, etc.  After we made our list of responsibilites, we then polled the classroom to see how many students had the same responsibilites.  The students found this to be a lot of fun.  We found it funny that if one student had to walk his or her dog, all of our friends had to walk the dog!!

Spanish - We are starting the official interview process with Naty.  She enjoys our non-traditional approach to teaching and works well with the team and students.  She also is a native speaker with an immersion approach, which fits well with the long term goals of the team!  Look for an update in the next few weeks!

What to look for next week:

ELA- We will review our sight words "little" and "give,"  along with working on words ending in (-un).

Writing- Our writers are working on finishing their final draft this week.

Math- We will continue working on teen numbers and story problems this week.  We will also be introducing a scale, and we will create a vertical and horizontal graph showing the objects we weighed on the scale.

Social Studies- This is our final week for Social Studies.  We will wrap up our unit by reading a book followed by a discussion for both of the following topics: being fair, and talking about problems together.