Friday, December 13, 2013

Week in Review--Gingerbread!

Reading:
-We had TWO sight words this week-- “is, how”.
-The CAFÉ strategy we worked on this week was the strategy.
“Recognize when two words rhyme”

We have been working on word families for a few weeks now and are getting really good at blending the letters and sounds together to make words. We are beginning to discuss that these words in the same family also can be called rhyming words!

How can you help your child with this strategy at home?
1.     When you are reading books, pick out various words and have your child come up with other words to rhyme with it!
2.     While reading your child’s “Roll&Read” talk about the words in the family and how they are rhyming words.
3.     Tell your child to come up with as many words as they can think of in the “-at” word family or the “-op” and so forth. Time them to come up with more and more each time!

4.     Have your child come up with nonsense words that rhyme with real words and create your own definition for the nonsense words!





Writing:
-We practiced fixing sentences this week that did not have a capital at the beginning of the sentence and several capital letters throughout the sentence. We talked about how capitals should only be found at the beginning of the sentence and not throughout it. We will discuss proper nouns when we return from break.
-We also met with our writing partners to practice helping them by not only stretching out unknown words or sight words, but we can also help them remember to add meatball spaces, noodle spaces, capitals and punctuation at the end of sentences! They did a GREAT job helping their partner make their writing easier to read.





























Math:
-We reviewed 3D shapes, addition to 5, number writing and ways to break numbers 11-19 into tens and ones.

-I continued report card testing this week. Most of the class is doing an EXCELLENT job on their second nine weeks math skills. I am excited to have report cards sent home!

CONTENT:
We learned and learned as much as we could in room 26 this week! Our theme this week was all about gingerbread books! We read so many books this week! Some of our favorites were several versions of the classic Gingerbread Man story, Gingerbread Girl, Gingerbread Mouse, Gingerbread Baby, Gingerbread Friends and Gingerbread Pirates! We completed puzzles, drawings, connect the dots and went on a gingerbread hunt around the entire school!




OUR CLASSROOM ELF'S SNOWY'S ADVENTURES THIS WEEK!















Friday, December 6, 2013

Week in Review--Holidays!


Reading:
-We had TWO sight words this week-- “on, did”.
-The CAFÉ strategy we worked on this week was the strategy.

“SummarizeText”

Summarizing is taking sections of text and pulling out the most important parts of what you
read. It is deciding what is worth remembering in a selection and capturing it
in your own words. As readers it is important to summarize what we read so we
can remember, organize, and understand the importance of the selection.

Summarizing is used often, but is challenging for young readers. This is because they try
to retell the entire story with great detail. They struggle with finding the
most critical elements of the story.


How can you help your child with this strategy at home?
  

Make it a game! After reading a few pages, have your child retell what happened in
those pages in 30 seconds to a minute. Remind them to only tell you the most
important details from the story.
.    

After reading a story, have your child draw a picture of the most important
information from the story. This will help your child decide the main idea of
the story, the most important details to be included in the picture.
   

When reading with your child, MODEL how to summarize by stating the main ideas and
organizing the events in the story out loud so your child can hear your thought
process in summarizing.


-We had two new choices added to our Word Work choice. The students can practice building sight words, class names and CVC word family words using our magnetic letter pans and our magna-doodle boards!






















-The books below are the books we read when we focused on summarizing beginning, middle and end. We also used the book in the middle to practice the strategy "visualizing" or make a mental picture or image in your mind while reading.







-Our word family this week was the "-ap" word family. We built words with a partner by matching someone who had a beginning sound to someone with the ending!














Math:

-We learned how to break numbers 11-19 up into tens and ones. All of these numbers
have one ten in them and the rest of the numbers are ones! We wrote these as number bonds and used unifix cubes as a hands on approach to seeing the different between the tens and ones places.

-We practiced new choices at all of our Daily 5 Math choices this week!

-I began testing for the report card. I will continue the next two weeks testing and retesting on 2D and 3D shapes, counting, number recognition, number writing, addition to 5, decomposing numbers 11-19 and sorting by shape.









-We have three new Math Magicians in our classroom who counted all the way to 100!





Writing:

-We created a new writing chart this week called the “Story Language Chart”. This chart helps the students add words to their writing to help tell their story in a specific order. The words on the chart are broken into three categories..beginning, middle and end. For example, a few words in the chart are “first, next, finally” or “One sunny day, after, in the end”. We wrote a
class story using these words and I even noticed a few of the students already adding them in their own writing. We also practiced not only being good writers but also we need to be good illustrators! We focused on how to think about our picture before drawing, think about the colors and shapes of the picture and make a mental picture…then draw!

-We also focused on ending punctuation and read sentences to decide which punctuation they should have as their ending!





Content:

We are so excited to be in one of the happiest and busiest months…December! We started the month off right away talking about holidays, Santa, reindeer and Christmas trees! We worked on a Santa counting book all week, made reindeer and even turned ourselves into elves! Be sure to click on the links below to view the videos of the class being “elfed”!
































Other:

We have a new visitor in our classroom this week. Our elf from the North Pole arrived on Monday. On his first day in our classroom, he was already up to all kinds of mischief. He taped red and green Christmas trees to the back of all of our chairs, wrapped our door up like a present, changed all of our table names and left us a note! We are being extra careful to not touch him so he does not lose his magic. The rest of the week he decorated our door again with a Santa balloon countdown to Christmas sign, was hanging on the "snowy" table sign, read a book all about the letter "E" and was confused why there wasn't a paged dedicated to elves and then got himself all wrapped up in tape and stuck to our front board! We named our elf on Monday Snowy and he sure is a super silly elf! 
































-On Thursday, we shopped for our friends and family at the school Penguin Patch Holiday Shop. We had a great time finding items for our loved ones to give at Christmas!