Friday, September 26th

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 will be analyzing the data this coming week.  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 began our unit on Communities this week. We spent time brainstorming places we can work, live and play in a community. We read the book On the Town to look into all of the places and workers a person finds within a community. We generated a huge list of the workers and places in our community. Next week we will be learning about groups in our communities and create a map of our own neighborhoods for homework!

Important Dates/Reminders

-I am still missing several student faces for our face project. Please make sure these are turned in ASAP.

-In Friday packs this first week in October, please pay attention for papers with a “B” for beginning on them. These need to be reviewed, fixed and returned in a timely manner.