Reading:
This week in reading we focused on a new strategy called “Listen with Understanding”. This strategy has the student focus on his/her listening skills when hearing a story OR when reading their own story. If we don’t listen or pay attention to story, we will have a difficult remembering what we read. We also reviewed “Check for Understanding” and “Print Concepts”.
In our accuracy lessons this week, we focused on ending sounds. We used our picture dice to practice our ending sounds, as well as matching picture cards to magnetic letters and matching picture cards to other picture cards that end with the same ending sound.
Our poem this week was called “Down by the Station”. We had a lot of fun reading the poem in silly voices on Wacky Wednesday, learning the motions to the poem and focusing on the different between letters, words and sentences using the words in our poem!
We used an app called Educreations this week to review one of our vocabulary words. Watch the video below to see the lesson in action! We will continue to use this app for a few weeks and then the students will complete their own lessons using it!
Rolling our picture dice to practice ending sounds!
We started using our iPads during our Daily 5 reading block. The students are starting out with skill practice apps to get used to the iPads, searching for apps and the rotation. We will begin using creation apps after we have had more practice!
We played a game called SNAP this week. This game is a review game that we will play just about every week. To start the game off we are reviewing our letter names and sounds. We will eventually move to sight words, cvc words and more! If a student pulls out the word "SNAP" with a picture of an alligator on it we all say "awwww snap!" and all of our cards have to go back in the bucket. There were a lot of giggles with this game!
Writing:
We finished our letters this week for handwriting! We had so much fun taking these first few weeks of school to focus on each letter, practice writing those letters and completing a fun activity that went along with each letter every day. This week we worked with Kk and Zz. So much fun! The rest of the week we practiced all of our letters A-Z by making the letters out of Play-doh, writing them on dry erase boards, painting our letters and the end of the week we made an ABC video on our iPad using the app iMovie! The video is below, check it out!
Math:
This week in math we focused on all of our numbers 1-20. We practiced recognizing, counting and writing our numbers 1-20. We watched fun videos, played apps on our iPads and worked together to write and count even past our number 20! We introduced a new choice at Math by Myself where students create numbers and shapes using Play-doh and the number and shapes mats. We will begin learning our other choices during Math Daily 3 soon!
Content:
APPLES, APPLES, APPLES! We had a tasty week all about apples! We learned how an apple tree grows from seed, to sprout, tree, leaves, flowers, more leaves, and then turns into green apples and then red! We investigated our apples, read books about apples and finished the week with an apple taste test! We ate our apples, applesauce, apple pie, apple muffins and apple juice! So much fun!
Just a little fun...hoping for the Cubs post season clinch this weekend! (update, they clinched their post season play! Go Cubs Go!!)
PRACTICE AT HOME:
Be sure to be reading the sight words on the yellow cards every night! Reviewing all of them every day, will help your child master these words in both reading and writing. Have your child quiz you, write the sight words in shaving cream, find the words in books at home, menus at a restaurant or even spell them out with a chant or a cheer!
Next Week:
- In reading we will learn the CAFE strategy "Name the Characters".
- In writing we will begin learning about Writer's Workshop.
- In math we will focus on sorting and more!
- Our theme next week is all about PUMPKINS!
Important Dates/Information:
- 9/30 Field Trip to Exploration Acres
- 10/9 End of First 9 Weeks
- 10/19-10/22 Parent/Teacher Conferences
- 10/30-Grandparent's Day 10-11AM (more info to come)
