PARTY TIME.....so FUN!

"Tis the Season

Have a wonderful time with your family and friends during this holiday season!!

Happy New Year to all as well............

Carolers

 Memorial Holiday Sing

Weekly Update

It has been a very busy week considering it is right before the holiday break. We have spent a great deal of time in math talking about categories, classifying and charts. In its simplest term we have been sorting in a more sophisticated way. Building charts and reading charts has been the focus and the kids are talking their way through understanding the concept. It is the language at times that is difficult but they have done a great job!

The letters this week have been x, y and an introduction to q and z. We have also been working on hearing ending sounds which is important when it comes to writing. We have just completed our Narrative Writing Unit and the children have written many stories. We are now celebrating the ones that they want to share with our classmates.

This past month we have also been working in our guided reading groups. This has been very exciting! They are all interested in reading and I know we will see great results by the end of the year.

Raz Kids

A note went home this week regarding your access to the Raz Kids website. This site gives your child an opportunity to read books at his/her  reading level. I want everyone to know that I have set settings at your child's independent reading level. This means that your child should be able to read these books easily, fluently and without help. The idea is to increase confidence and the desire to read more. I will adjust the levels as I see fit based upon their progress in my guided reading groups which are instructional sessions. Have fun reading!

Our Feast

Our Thanksgiving feast in class was fun and exciting! We dressed up as Native Americans and sat around a long table together sharing lots of goodies! Thank you to those who helped make this happen. Everything was DELICIOUS!

Have a wonderful holiday with your family!

Week of November 8th

It was a pleasure meeting all of you at conferences. Thank you for being prompt and keeping me on schedule!

This week we spent time working on the letters e and r as well as p and j. We are moving along very quickly with letter introductions and their sounds. This is a great help for reading and writing. As you know we have been writing for a few weeks now. It is difficult and challenging for some but the kids love to write and tell their stories! We are currently learning how to edit our work with the help of checklists to keep us on track with conventions and story telling guidelines. The stories are small moments in our lives but need to be told with a beginning, middle and end. They are working very hard.

In Math we continue to work on counting, writing and comparing sets to ten. Our latest challenge has been understanding the concept of whole and parts. We have been making combinations with all numbers to 10 and trying to determine a pattern as we discover all the possibilities. We played a spinning game and  wrote numbers, made numbers and equal sets with playdough, discovered combinations to 10 with counters and recorded our answers, finished our Apple counting book and completed a counting jar activity recording many ways to represent the number we counted. We have been very busy!

Guided reading will start in the near future. The kids are so excited about learning to read. This is where the skills of letter/sound identification are so important as they begin to put these into practice. We are looking forward to it.