December

I hope all of you are having a wonderful break with your children!  I'm enjoying my break, but I do miss my students!  We had a blast the last couple weeks before Christmas break!  Between the play and the anticipation for Christmas, we had fun learning about retelling stories by reading some books about Santa.  We also finished our ng/nk phonics unit and did some addition math CIMs.  Please continue to work with your children over the break so they will come back ready to tackle our upcoming units!  Here are some pictures of the last couple weeks in our classroom!

We won a sno-cone party for earning 20 charms!

Our play was a hit!

 My little reindeer!

PJ day!

Fall Fun!

The past couple of weeks have been so much fun!  Between character dance, our Fall party and Fall carnival we have been having fun and being kids!  We got to explore a pumpkin by using our five senses, wrote the steps to carving a pumpkin, learned how a pumpkin grows and learned neat facts about bats!
At the Fall Carnival, I got pie'd in the face by quite a few students!  It was such a great night, so thank you every one who showed up and supported our school!

Text features, Nouns and Science!

These past couple of weeks have been filled with lots of new learning!  First, we've been learning about text features!  This includes captions, labels, glossaries, bold words, headings and titles.  The students have been great at remembering what these things are and finding them in magazines and non-fiction texts!

Next, we have introduced nouns!  We talked about how there is a noun club and only a person, place or thing can get in!  The students had a blast telling me what things could get in the noun club and what things couldn't.  We made a poster for a reference, then the students got to make their own noun book to show me what they knew about nouns!

Finally, we had our first science experiment on Friday!  We had a special guest (my roommate) Scientist Oh-HaHa!  The students absolutely loved having a new face in the classroom and the excitement she brought to the five senses experiments.  We set up five stations 1. Sight 2. Hearing 3. Smell 4. Touch 5. Taste.  The students had to write in their journals what they saw, heard, smelt, touched and tasted.  It was such a fun way to end our week and I'm sure the students will be asking me when Scientist Oh-Haha will be returning!

Learning, Learning, Learning!

  It's the 7th week of school!  Where has the time gone?!  I can't believe how fast the time is going by, but it has been amazing to see the growth of the students!  They are learning so much and I could not be more proud of the progress they have made!  Thank you parents for doing your part at home to make our classroom so successful!
  In reading, we are in our last week of digraphs.  We've been working hard at trying to remember that our digraphs are two letters that stick together to make one sound and what sounds they make.  We have been digraph detectives and have been finding and pointing out every digraph we see!  We have our digraph dictation on Friday and will move into bonus letters (f, l, s and sometimes z) next week!
  In math, we are still on addition and we have been working on horizontal addition, vertical addition, word problems, adding zero and different ways to make numbers (2, 3, 4, 5).  We have also been learning words that help us figure out that we need to add (in all, more, altogether).
  We have made it to 13 charms!  We only need 7 more to play plinko and to win a class party!

My 'th' detectives!

 My 'wh' detectives!

 My 'sh' detectives!

 My 'ch' detectives!

 My 'ck' detectives!

Lots of Learning!

It has been so amazing to see how much we have learned and progressed in just a few weeks!  This week we have started learning addition number sentences and some strategies to figure out addition problems!  We have counted pictures, counters and have put the bigger number in our heads and counted up!  We're also learning more SUMS games to practice those strategies and to become better mathematicians!
In reading, we've been learning our digraphs (wh, ch, th, sh, ck).  We have learned how to tap them out to spell a word and have learned two catchy phonics dances to remember sh and ch (ask them to do the chicken cha-cha for you!).
In writing, we have been practicing brainstorming ideas, writing a focus statement, writing sentences and drawing illustrations that match our sentence.  We have also been transferring our  four square writing to regular handwriting paper.  We're also still working on using capitals to start our sentences, finger space and punctuation!
We're now at 10 charms and looking to get 10 more in order to get a class party of some kind!  Keep going over our schools ABC's so we can earn those charms!