Week of September 24th, 2012

The class worked very hard this week.  Here is a little bit of what we did!

 

When students bring in their Reading Log Sheets, and they have read at least ten minutes four times a week, they may put a marble in the jar.  When our jar is full, we are going to get a new book for our classroom library.  Students did a great job this week bringing in their Reading Logs.  Remember they come home on Friday and need to come back the following Thursday!

You will notice on the Reading Log that there is a sticker.  This sticker helps me remember how much students read the week before.  I noticed a lot of students going above and beyond the goal.  That is awesome!

 

When students come into the classroom in the morning, they have a "Morning Work" job.  Right now their morning work job is to complete a sheet about the number of the day.  This helps student to identify numbers, write numbers, understand even and odd, and practice basic adding and subtracting. 

 

We continue to work on our math centers at the end of math.  This week on the BrightLink Center we played  Funky Mummy Addition and Skip Counting By 2's and 10's .  The other two centers were Five In A Row (From The Investigations Math Program) and Egg Head.  Both of the games help practice counting, adding, and identifying numbers.  It is also a great time for students to work on being a good partner.

We kicked off our Writer's Workshop on Monday.  Students are working on writing small moments.  These are true stories about their lives.  I have been very impressed with our Writing Workshop time.  Students are focused and coming up with great ideas!  When we are writing small moments we think of an idea, picture it in our minds, draw the pictures, and write the words to match our pictures.  Students have green writing folders.  When they have a piece in progress it goes on the blue dot side, and when it is finished it goes on the red dot side.

Our Word Wall words this week were "in" and "is".  As a class we came up with these two sentences and our Word Wall Specialist this week got to write them in the sentence.  We are really working on writing in lower case letters!

You may have noticed that on our blog we have our very own book shelf with four of our read aloud books on it.  Every month we will change the books on our bookshelf.  We read The Kissing Hand and A Chair For My Mother during writing time as good examples of small moment writing.  We read the nonfiction book Monarch Butterflies during science, and we acted out the butterfly life cycle.  The book I Need My Monster was chosen by the class as the book the students wanted to share with their families.  Have a great weekend!

Pajama Day In Ms. Henault's Class

 

We will be having Pajama Day this Friday (9-28-12) to celebrate reaching our class points goal for the last 2 weeks.  I have observed so many positive behaviors in our classroom!  Students are welcome to wear their pajamas to school, but they don't have to. 

Our Hatching Butterfly

Our chrysalis hatched into a monarch butterfly.  We are going to let our butterfly free so it can lay more eggs.  Then the life cycle starts all over again.  We love butterflies.
 Written by: Ms. Henault's Class

Week of September 17th, 2012

We have been working very hard in our classroom this week.  Here is a little bit of what we have been up to.

Students continue to practice picking out books for their book boxes to read for the week.  Students pick out three books and I pick out one.  Students are working on picking out "just right" books for themselves.  This means they can read most of the words, can comprehend the book, and are interested in the book.  They use these books for reading to themselves and reading to someone.

We have now built our stamina up to 16 minutes of reading to ourselves and 12 minutes of reading to someone.  While students are reading to someone they take turns being the reader and the listener.  The listener uses the statement "I just heard you read...", to make sure that they are listening and comprehending what the reader is reading.

We have started up our math centers which students participate in at the end of math time.  The centers help students to practice the skills we are working on.  This week we are working on identifying and ordering numbers, skip counting, adding sums, and story problems.  There are three centers that students rotate through.  The centers are introduced and practiced on Monday and then students rotate through them on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.  This week one center was on the BrightLink where students worked together to complete two different math games.  The other two centers were games.  One game was from the Investigations Math Program, and the other was a game based on the math concepts we are learning.

On Thursday we completed our interactive nonfiction writing about the butterfly life cycle.  Students worked hard on using finger spaces between their words, writing lower case letters, sounding out words,  and starting sentences with an uppercase letter and ending them with a period.  Next week we will start our Writing Workshop!

Our Word Wall words this week were and and to.    We practiced reading, sky writing, and tapping out these words.  As a class we created and wrote two sentences using these words.

Week of September 10th, 2012

 

Everyday students have been practicing reading to themselves.   We started by reading independently for only three minutes.  We add one minute everyday, so that we can build up our stamina.  Today we were able to stay quietly reading for 11 minutes.  It was amazing! 

 

 Students have also been practicing reading to someone.  This helps us to build up our reading fluency!  Students pick their partners and then take turns reading to each other.  If students do not know the words, they can tell their partner about the pictures.  This EEKK poem helps us to remember how we sit with our partner and where the book should be placed.  We started by reading for three minutes with a partner and we are now up to 7 minutes.
 

 We have been doing a lot of scientific observations of our caterpillar.  Students have three jobs to do in their science notebooks.  They must draw a picture of what they see, write an "I see" sentence, and an "I think." sentence.  The "I see" sentence describes what the student sees the caterpillar is doing and the "I think" sentence is a prediction of what it might look like the next day.

Every Thursday afternoon for a couple of weeks we are having "extra" guidance time, but instead of Mr. Lane teaching it is me!  Our school has been practicing four ways to help us listen.  The four ways are eyes watching, ears listening, voice quiet, and body still.  We also have been practicing ways to help us focus.  We have had two puppet friends, Snail and Puppy, come in to help us learn!

Our Word Wall words this week were the and of.  We practiced spelling these words during morning meeting. We practiced spelling them by tapping them out on our arms and clapping them.  We also wrote a sentence using both of the words.  I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Caterpillar Fun!

Our caterpillar was in his J shape when I went to our staff meeting and when I came back he was already in his chrysalis!

Success!

Thanks to Mrs. Burroughs, our wonderful librarian, we have our very own caterpillar!  Yesterday every student wrote and illustrated a scientific observation of the caterpillar.  Students also wrote a prediction of what would happen the next day.  Some students predicted he would go into a J shape and he did!

Week of September 4th, 2012

We had a great second week, and I am happy to say our blog is now up and running! Here is a glimpse into our week.

 We have been exploring our BrightLink this week.  Students have used the BrightLink to read the morning message, answer the morning question, play math and word games, and use different math tools.

 We reached our paws points goal for last week and this week.  This week our goal was to get 350 points, and we ended up getting 639 points.  That was in only four days!  There were a lot of students being kind and following the school and classroom rules.  To celebrate meeting our points goal two weeks in a row we watched The Magic School Bus: Butterfly and the Bog Beast.  This goes along with our science unit about butterflies.

 We have also started writing butterfly books.  Students are each writing and illustrating their own book as we write one as a class.  We have finished the first step of the life cycle.  As authors, we are working on how we start and end sentences, using finger spaces between our words, and sounding out words we are not sure how to spell.

This is our classroom word wall.  Every Monday we will be adding a few words to our word wall, and those will be the words of the week.  These are words we will practice spelling, and we will always have a place to look in case we forget how to spell them.  We added the word a the first week and the word I this week.

Remember to subscribe to our blog at the bottom of the page.  All you have to do is enter your email, and you will receive notifications when we have put up something new.  I will always update the blog on Friday, but sometimes there may be extra posts during the week.  Have a great weekend and get some rest!

Be On The Look Out!

Our first science unit will be studying monarch butterflies.  We would like at least one caterpillar for our classroom, so that we can observe it as it changes.  The whole class went for a hunt to find a monarch caterpillar this week, but we were unable to find any.  If you happen to find one we would love to have it for our classroom!