Week of September 23rd, 2013

One of the morning jobs is to read the morning message and answer the question on the BrightLink.

We have been working hard on addition story problems in our math books.  We are working on showing our thinking, forming our numbers correctly, and writing an equation to match the story problem.

You may have noticed we switched one of our tables in for four desks.  Everyone will get a chance to sit at a desk this year!

We have started up our Math Menu time this week.  Students are rotating through 3 centers.  Eventually students will pick the center they want to work at that day.  Students played an adding game with a partner, put numbers in order to 100 on the computer, and worked with a ten frame on the ipad.  This is a time when I will get to work with kids in small groups, while other kids are working independently.

Mr. Lane has been teaching us about the Unthikables, and how they can get us off track.  He gave us copies, so we could hang them up in our classroom.

We have some math work already up on our Marvelous Math Work Wall.  These are some great examples of organized math thinking!

We have 3 words up on our Word Wall.  They are a, I, and at.  We will continue adding words to our Word Wall.  These are words that are used a lot, and are sometimes tricky words that don't follow our spelling rules.

In Writing this week, we have started our Writing Workshop. Students are working on writing about things that they know about.  

Week of September 16th, 2013

We worked in buddies to write pages for our classroom book.  The book is about using manners in our classroom.  It was inspired by the books "What Do You Say, Dear?" and "What Do You Do, Dear?"  We got to use water colors to illustrate our books!  They are hanging in the hallway, so check them out!

We played a math game that helped us use a number line and think about the order of numbers!

We started showing our math thinking when solving addition story problems.  We can use pictures, words, or numbers to show our thinking.  Someone should be able to look at our work and understand our math thinking.

Mr. Bouchard came in to teach us about the iPads.  Students got to try out a math app. 

We met our "paws" points goal, so we celebrated by watching a short movie based on Eric Carle stories!

We started up our listening center during Daily 5 time.  We can use the computers, ipad, and laptop for the listening center.  Now we have 3 choices during daily 5.  Only 2 more choices left to go!

We had E.L.F.  We learned about spiders!  Thanks to the parents who helped out!

It was great to see everyone who came to Open House!

Week of September 9th, 2013

We practiced two different games this week in math.  They are called Compare and  Compare Dots.  Students work in pairs flipping over cards and deciding which card is greater.  Compare uses cards with numbers and pictures and Compare Dots uses cards that have different amounts of dots on them.  We have worked a lot on counting and ordering numbers this week.  We have also practiced using three different math tools.  They are a number line, a hundreds chart, and a ten frame.

We continue to work on our Daily 5 skills.  We are practicing Read to Self, Read to Someone, and listening using Tumblebooks.

Sometimes there is an odd number, and you get to read to a stuffed animal buddy!

We have been doing some brain breaks to get our wiggles out.  Sometimes we use the BrightLink to do our brain breaks.

In writing, we have been doing an Interactive Write about the life cycle of the butterfly.  We work as a class to write a sentence on a sentence strip and students work independently to write it on their paper with an illustrated picture.  We can't wait to show these off at Open House!  We hope to see everyone there!

Week of September 2nd, 2015

Look at all the pajamas!  We celebrated making our points goal by having pajama day today!

We practiced using scissors and glue safely this week.  We did this by cutting out the stages of the butterfly life cycle and putting them in order.

We have been practicing counting, recognizing, and writing numbers in math.  We practiced counting by playing a game called In the Doghouse.  

We have started practicing Read to Someone during Daily 5 time.  We have 3 different ways we can read a book.  We can read the pictures, read the words, and retell the story.

This poem helps us remember our jobs during Read to Someone.

During Word Study, we are using a program called Fundations.  Here is the Fundations website if you want to learn more: Fundations.  Some students are familiar with the program from kindergarten.  We are working on writing lowercase letters and letter sounds.  We have practiced t, f, b, n, m, u, and i.

During writing time, we have been working on Our Hopes and Dreams and Our Classroom Rules.  They are posted in our classroom, and we can't wait for you to see them at Open House! 

Have a great weekend!