Author's Chair

My class loves sharing their writing in the "Author's Chair". This week we practiced capitalizing the first word in a sentence, adding a period and writing all of the other words/letters in the sentence with lower case letters (unless it's a word from our "What Gets a Capital Letter" chart). Each student that shares first reads his/her sentence and then shows the class their illustration. We give each author a compliment on his/her writing before the next student shares. We are becoming authors and illustrators!

Surfer of the Week--Elsie!

Elsie was our first "Surfer of the Week". We loved getting to know all about Elsie this week when she brought items that are special to her in to share with us. On her last day, her mom came in and read us a story that was one of Elsie's favorites from when she was a baby. Thank you for sharing with us this week Elsie!

My Eyes Can See

New Bathroom Procedure!

Today we learned our new bathroom procedure during our morning 90 minute reading block where we do Daily 5. The students are allowed to use the restroom without asking to go, but only get the one chance during the 90 minute block. During the student's choice time, I am working either one on one conferring with students or working in strategy groups and are not to be interrupted while they are completing their independent choices. We were having a few students who seemed to be spending more time in the bathroom than at their choice =). So to solve this problem, we now have our names outside the bathroom door and if a student chooses to use the restroom during one of his/her choices they remove their name tag from the door and place it in the basket. After doing so, they go about the rest of their morning completing various activities during each of the five choices. Today being the first day, we had several students who were sure to use the new procedure. I'm sure the "newness" will wear off and it will just become part of our normal routine!

Election Day!

During writing time today we discussed how today is Election Day. We put what we are studying in writing and information about Election Day together in a predictable chart. We started talking this week about what words get a capital letter, the beginning of a sentence has a capital letter and every sentence should have a period at the end. We haven't talked about question marks or exclamation points yet, so right now all of our sentences are usually ending in a period. We completed the chart about Election Day using what we have learned with capitalizing the beginning of the sentence, special holidays and names of people. We also had a few words within the sentence that were missing and we discussed why they should not be capitalized. We finished each sentence by adding a nice, round period! After completing our chart, we read through our Time for Kids magazine all about voting on Election Day!

Fun with Numbers 0-20!

During several math mini-lessons we have practiced recognizing and creating numbers 0-20. This week we put an activity at "Math with Someone" where they are doing the same idea as we did in the mini-lesson. One partner takes a number card out of the bag, while the other partner closes his/her eyes. The partner reads the number and hides it and the partner who had their eyes shut opens them and creates the number on the pan. If they get the number correct, we give each other a compliment on a job well done. If they create the incorrect number, we ask them to try again!

 

Below is video of two students completing the activity together.

 

Describing Spiders

To finish our study about spiders, we completed a chart describing what spiders are, what they can do and what they have. After filling it out we realized we learned a lot about those 8 legged non-insects!