September 22nd

Language Arts

This week we read the story "The Fox and the Falling Leaves".  It is about a little fox who has never seen the season of Fall before.  He doesn't understand why the leaves are turning colours and falling off the tree, and he thinks the tree is sick or something is wrong. He does every kind thing possible to stop Fall from coming to the tree, but in the end he realizes that the tree is okay with losing its leaves. Through discussion, the students shared their ideas of what they would say to the tree to make it feel better.  They then tried their best to write their sentence in their writing notebooks independently.  This was their very first attempt at creating a sentence.  I was looking for them to have an uppercase at the beginning, a period at the end, and some beginning sounds - and maybe even some middle sounds - for their words.  We did a guided drawing of a fox that they used in their illustration of their writing.

We made some cute little foxes to wrap up the project.

 We are continuing to learn a letter sound each day.  This week we learned       X (Max the Ox), D (Daisy Dragon), A (Actress Annie) and T (Timmy Tiger).  Learning the sounds through the Animated Literacy program really helps the students remember the letter sound.  Each letter has a character and an action to help them remember.  We do a guided drawing with each letter to create new words and sentences.  

We learned a new reading strategy this week: Lips the Fish.  

Lips the Fish reminds us to get our lips ready for that beginning (and ending) sound in new words.  It is the starting point to sounding out words.  With that, we also started our daily word sorts.  For the next couple weeks our focus will be on beginning consonants, which give us practice using Lips the Fish.

The second reading strategy we learned this week was Eagle Eye.  This strategy reminds us to look at the pictures in a book for a clue to what the words might be.  We had fun using a magnifying glass to look at the pictures in a little mini book.  We practiced the Eagle Eye strategy when doing Read to Self this week.

Social Studies

We continued to have a Special Student each day. The students just love this activity and can't wait to find out who the Special Student will be today. Their presenting skills are improving - they especially like wearing the microphone to talk!  They are also learning how to ask really good questions to find out more about the special student.  We are able to find more and more words that we know in the guided writing. 

Students have brought in their All About Me Collages.  They are fantastic!  These give us all an understanding of what we are like as individuals.  We will soon be discussing how we fit together to make a group.

Math

It was the 10th day of school this week and with that came Zero the Hero.  He is the number that helps create new numbers after we get to 9.  Every time we have a day of school that ends with a 0, Zero the Hero will come visit and we will do some special activities. This time, we made Zero the Hero Capes and little Zero the Hero bobble heads. 

Science

We learned about the seasons cycle by reading about seasons and listening to this catchy song over and over.  Click the link so you can learn the song too, and play it in your house over and over. 

Seasons Song Link 

We created an anchor chart to use a visual clue as we work through the seasons this year, and the students created a turning seasons cycle in their notebooks.

Hopefully we can get our Fall Walk in next week so that we can do some observations and discussions about Fall.

We had lots of fun in gym this week, rotating through some locomotor stations.

We logged onto to our Chromebooks for the first time this week. This is a tricky process for the kiddos but with practice, they will become proficient at it.  We will be using Chromebooks for many things this year.  Mrs. Kloschinsky came into to do the Admirable Technology Use agreement with all students so they all know the rules about using technology at RBES.