Weekly News October 6th

Hi!  There are so many exciting things happening in our classroom. We have finished up our first unit of reading in which we built some strong reading habits and our first math unit where we worked hard on partners of ten.  This week we will also finish up our small moment stories.  Last week we added to our aquariums and this week we will add bess beetles and pill bugs to our terrariums!  Please try to check the blog a couple times a week as I will work on adding pictures of our weekly events as they happen!

Thank you for helping students remember their student of the week bags!  We only have a couple left this week.  It has been fun learning about each other and growing as a classroom community.

Upcoming events:

Oct. 9th-Homecoming Parade-We hope you can join us. Wear orange and black to school today! Crazy Hair Day!

Oct. 16th-Math Morning 7:30-8:15 AM Ryan Flessner, our math consultant from Butler, will be presenting information about math instruction. Also, a chance to see independent time in the classroom

Oct.  20th   Grandparents and Goodies Family Night-Please RSVP if you haven't and are attending.

Oct. 23 & 24-No School

Red Ribbon Week:

Red Ribbon Week is an alcohol, tobacco and other drug and violence prevention awareness campaign observed annually in October in the United States.

Tues. Oct. 27th....no sweat being drug free...wear sweats
Wed. Oct. 28th....Red Day
Thurs. Oct. 29th...drug free is double the fun....twinning
Fri. Oct. 30th...we're the ghosts. ..say BOO to drugs....wear orange and black!

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop:  We began our new unit yesterday: Word Detectives Uses All They Know to Solve Words. In this unit we will work on our word solving skills. When readers get stuck, they think, "Does it look right? Does it make sense? Does it sound right?" We will also work on more word solving strategies as our books become trickier.  I have begun meeting with guided reading groups.  In these groups students are reading a book a bit higher than their independent books.  This gives them a chance to try out new strategies.  I am asking them to pack that book to bring home on days when they receive a new one to share at home. 

Writers' Workshop: We will be wrapping up our small moment stories this week. We have been using Night of the Veggie Monster, by George McClements, to notice and try new things in our writing.  We also did some of our own research in books to see what our favorite authors try in their writing so that we can give it a try. We noticed that Mo Willems uses many speech bubbles and does a great job of adding action to his characters. We will finish up the week with some revising and editing and finally publishing our best small moment story.

Word Study: We introduced 5 new word wall words today. The words are: the, went, is, are, be. We will be assessing these words on Friday. These are words we want students to be able to read and write automatically without having to think to sound them out.

Math Workshop: We finished up our first math unit, Partners and Number Patterns through 10. All students did very well with this unit.  We have begun our next unit which will focus on addition and subtraction strategies.  We are working towards fluency in addition and subtraction within 10.  A homework sheet will come home on Wednesday.

Science: Our aquariums and terrariums are growing! Last week we added snails and guppies to our aquariums. This week we will be adding bess beetles and pill bugs to our terrariums. Hopefully most of the plants that we grew made it home safely yesterday!  Here are some pictures from when the snails arrived! 

Have a great rest of the week!  Check back for more later in the week :)

-Samantha