Friday, January 28th

It has been a fantastic week in Room 301! It has really been noticeable this week how much our kids have grown into independent workers. In September we could write independently for about 5 minutes. Today, we can write for 15 minutes independently! In September we could read independently for 3-5 minutes. Today, we can read for nearly 10-15 minutes. In November we started stations and could handle four stations in a week. This week our kids traveled to ten stations over three days! It has literally been awesome for me to watch these kids grow, form friendships, come out of their shells, and work together as a team, as a school family.
Reader’s Workshop

Guided reading groups have met EVERY day this week! Please be sure that when your child brings home a book bag it is returned to school with a signed parent “comment” form! Many parents have been leaving great comments about how their child has been doing with the books at home. There have also been a few questions about books being sent home for a “re-read”. On almost all nights two books will come home with your child. One will be a new text. Please spend time going over this text with your child (looking at the pictures, saying the words, even spelling the words). The second text is called a “re-read”. This book comes home for a second trip for many reasons. When it comes home it comes home as a familiar text. Reading something familiar helps to build confidence in our readers so that when they read, they not only feed good about themselves, but they are imprinting sight words (high frequency words) into their minds. Secondly, we want our kids to sound as though they were talking when they read. We call this fluency. We want our readers to sound fluent.

Writer’s Workshop

This week the kids have been working on a “beginning”, “middle” and “ending” to a story. New terms of “Once upon a time” and “Last” have been introduced as a way to get a story started and finish off a story. It has really been neat to see the kids using strategies we practice over and over as a whole group independently. You can see them “stretching” out words like a piece of chewed bubble gum so that they can pick out the sounds within a word, and then transcribe the letters on their paper.

Math

In Math this week we have been continued our work with addition. We are using numbers that when combined add up to 10 or less. These mathematicians have been introduced to many of the tools we have to use in our room to help us count (counting bears, cubes, counting dinosuars, etc.). We have also been working with pan balances and comparing objects to find out which is heavier, which is lighter, and how we can make different objects equal (balanced). This was a VERY popular station this week during Work Stations!

Important News

Information came home this week regarding our Valentines’ Day Party on Monday, February 14th. Please make sure to send in your child’s cereal box ASAP for their card holders.

Additionally, I wanted to let you know about a unique opportunity being offered in the Walled Lake School District right now. Walled Lake’s Foundation For Excellence is sponsoring a 50-50 raffle called the “Tuition Expedition”. You can purchase a $100 raffle ticket for this event by calling Sandy Richards George at the ESC at (248) 956-2116. There will be 500 tickets sold across the district. The winner either receives $25,000 to be put towards college tuition for your child OR there is a $20,000 cash payout. You can get more info on this at www.foundation4excellence.com .

I bring this to your attention because it was the Walled Lake Foundation for Excellence that awarded me the grant money last year ($3,750) to purchase all of our Smartboard Equipment. We are so very fortunate in WL to have a foundation established with a dedicated staff wanting to help out our classroom teachers. Without this funding, YOUR child would not be having the experience they are having this year with this advanced technology in their classroom. We are the only classroom at Dublin to have this equipment and are one out of less than 5 elementary classrooms in the whole district (14 elementary schools) to have this technology. I was very fortunate to receive this funding and am hoping that you too are very appreciative of this learning tool. If you are able to do so and purchase a raffle ticket, you would be helping the Foundation to grow and give more to the students of Walled Lake. If you are unable to purchase a raffle ticket, please check the web site www.foundation4excellence.com for other exciting events they will be hosting this year and over the summer.


Snack Leader’s: Monday: Geneva; Tuesday: Gabby; Wednesday: Emma; Thursday: Hannah; Friday: Robby
Tuesday, February 1st – PTA Meeting in the Dublin Media Center (7:00pm)

Saturday, February 5th – Scrapbooking Crop Day in the Old Gym at Dublin (10am-8pm)