Friday, September 28th

Fall was in the air this week though our room temperature felt a bit like winter most mornings.  I mentioned to the children that they may want to bring sweatshirts in their backpacks until the heat is turned on here. 

We continue to settle into our routines in all subject areas and I’m hopeful that you’re hearing about our learning first hand from your child.

Word Study

This week we studied our first lessons with long and short vowel sounds.  Your child should be able to tell you two ways to know when a word will likely use its long vowel sound.  We used word cards to make long vowel words.  Students also worked again with consonant blends.  As a teacher I appreciate that our word study program spirals back to concepts covered for review and to deepen understanding.  For many students in my class I have discussed with them the benefits our word study lessons will have on their reading and writing skills. 

Reader’s Workshop

I completed most of the DRA testing this week and last week and will be analyzing the data this coming week.  Look for an email from me with more individualized data about your child! I’ve found that most students maintained their reading comprehension and word decoding skills, but have fallen with fluency.  Fortunately, this is often easily remedied with practice, practice, practice.  It is important for children to read “just right” or appropriately leveled books when reading to increase fluency.  In fact fluency building happens when reading texts that are familiar to the reader.  Please encourage daily reading at home.  Research shows that the number one way to increase reading is simply time spent reading regularly.  We kicked off our workshop this week learning about 3 types of classroom readers…the “Wow” reader, “So-so” reader and the “Oops” reader.  We created charts for our classroom to remind us what these readers look like.  Of course we are all striving to become “Wow” readers where we stay on task, are involved with our books, are quiet, use our known strategies, find comfy spots quickly etc.

Writer’s Workshop

Our class enjoyed several wonderfully written stories this week, which we explored for the author’s craft.  We spent time looking at Cynthia Rylant’s writing using repetitive text, lists, and circle backs (where the other comes back to  a particular phrase/ part of the story).  Students attempted using some of these crafts in their writings.   We also looked at Kevin Henkes’ stories again for similar crafts.  I was amazed to hear some of the pieces written this week during our workshop time.  Students enjoy the sharing component of our workshop too!

Math Workshop

Our unit 1 (review of beginning math concepts) finished up this week.  Students seem more comfortable with coin counting, time telling and skip counting than they were our first week of school.   Most days I am able to check journal pages completed, but I will take these home over the next week and complete any that I missed.  Once these are sent home it will be beneficial for you to review these with your child and have him/her redo any pages with which s/he struggled.  You’ll notice that it’s not always the concept that is misunderstood, but the directions (something we will be working on throughout the year asking students to slow down and process before jumping in too fast).  We completed the unit 1 review assessment Thursday.  This is only a unit review and not the benchmark test I referred to during curriculum night.  Remember that when the benchmark test is coming up, a study guide will be sent home.   

Social Studies

Students continue to learn about communities.  This week we talked about the groups we are a part of in our community – at school, at home and other groups. Then we created a web of the groups that we are apart of in our lives. We also spent time taking a walking field trip outside where we talked about the human and natural features around Dublin. Back in the building, we created a giant map showcasing both human and natural features shown on a map.