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.