October 13th

We have finished up learning about the season of fall in Science.  Some activities this week included journaling about fall, drawing and writing about activities, weather and clothing in the fall, and meeting our class tree.  We will make observations about our class tree as it changes throughout the seasons in our tree journals.

Rainbow Words began this week and the students were excited to start collecting their words on their rings.  Each day we will be practicing our Rainbow Words during Word Work, which is part of the Daily 5 framework.  We learned about what Word Work looks like for the students and the teacher.  Word Work activities this week included using wiki stix to make words, play dough and using magnet letters. We also do a word wall chant each day and use our Lips and the Fish and Stretchy Snake strategies to sound out the new words.

Home Reading also began this week.  I have read with every student this week and have placed them on the correct level.  It is really neat to read one-on-one with the students and see them get so excited when they use their strategies to figure out unfamiliar words!

We are reading a fantastic story called Big Pumpkin.  It is a great story to introduce the students to parts of a story. If you would like to hear the story you can click HERE.  I introduced the students to using a "reading rope".  This nifty tool will help guide the students through the parts of a story.  This week our focus was on the CHARACTERS and SETTING of Big Pumpkin. Next week we will talk about the beginning, middle and end and how they solve the problem of pulling out the big pumpkin.  

 Reading Rope

House - what is the setting Children - Who are the characters? 

Knot - What is the problem? 

B, M, E - What happens in the beginning, middle, end?

Bow - How is the problem solved?

In Math, along with continuation of our number unit, we are starting to learn about shapes, sorting and patterns.  This is such a fun unit because it is so hands on.  We read some great books to introduce the concept, and a favourite was Sort It Out! We played a couple fun little sorting games, including this one where I piled a bunch of different objects in the middle of the floor and the students had to word together to sort them according to the sorting rule.  They did a great job at working together to sort!

Students were also given piles of various objects and they rotated through each centre to sort the objects according to their own sorting rule.  The instructions were to get creative and sort each set of objects two different ways, and tell me their sorting rule.

 We played a game called Number Word Blackout where the students flipped over dominos from their "domino grave yard", counted the pips and matched it to the correct number word.  The children are beginning to recognize the numbers words without looking at the chart on the wall.

CONGRATULATIONS TO GRACIE FOR BEING OUR FIRST STUDENT OF THE WEEK!