**We all had a super busy week. The students continue to respond to our Eagle Essentials Guidelines and are very much a part of shaping their own behavior. We continue to work on fostering greater independence in and outside of our classroom.
**PICTURE DAY is Tuesday, October 4th. Get those smiles ready! I am hoping that we can be among the first done in the morning. G. Garcia, M. Chlebek and S. Walker have volunteered to lend a hand or comb!
**WALK to SCHOOL DAY is Wednesday, October 5th. Each child who walks to school will receive a special stamp and shoe to be colored in and displayed in the gym. Don't worry if you ride the bus or drive--Mr. Hancock will walk around the block with students at lunch time and they will receive their stamp and shoe too!
**NO SCHOOL on Monday, October 10th in observance of Columbus Day.
**A letter regarding Parent/Teacher Conference times is in your child's back pack. Please send back to confirm by Friday, October 14th.
**PLEASE NOTE that school is in session ONLY in the morning on Thursday, October 20th and Friday October 21st. Dismissal is at 11:00 am. Hephzibah students, bus and RFCC students will will picked up as usual.
**Route to Reading Rotation 1 will conclude on Wednesday, October 5th. You will receive notification from the current teacher as to whether your child has mastered the particular skill. Rotation 2 will begin Tuesday, October 11th. At that time, you will receive notification of the skill your child will be working on.
**In preparation for our October Conference, I have begun our Fall Assessment, Math Baseline and Social/Emotional Growth Reflection observation. I will share these with you at our conference.
**In Friendship Club this week Ms. Bell-Bey led a discussion on celebrating our differences. The students created a head shot of themselves and we will make a class book.
**It is evident that many students have begun to use the LEXIA program for home practice. Great! Keep up the good work!
**This month, we will have our first meeting with our BOOK BUDDIES in Ms. Balicki's 5th grade class. Stay tuned!!
This week:
It was all about APPLES! Apple mania has hit our classroom! We have begun our Apple cross curricular theme. The students participated in an initial inquiry to determine what they knew about the apple. They had great fun using the magnifiers and microscope to observe the flower, seeds, flesh, skin and core. We learned what a blossom is. The apples were cut on their sides to reveal the flower or star. We read informational books and gathered more information from our computer search on apple trees, grafting process and products made with apples. Out taste test is on going! We are relating our study of Apples into our math, reading, science, art and writing curriculum. For Homework, the students are keeping an Apple Tree Reading Log. Stay tuned!!!
Reading: We have begun UNIT 1 in our Treasures Reading Series. The students built background knowledge on types of families they knew about. We discussed animal families and human families. We all shared experiences about our families. The students listened to a song about families. The students listened to a Big Book story called "Whose Baby Am I?" The students made predictions about the story content and observed patterns in the text. We reviewed our sight words I and CAN and introduced the word WE. We spelled and wrote them and used them in our journal. Our sound in isolation this week was the letter Mm. We worked on identifying the sound at the beginning and ending of words. The students are working on additional vocabulary referred to as Robust Vocabulary. Ask your child what ANIMAL, PROTECT, TOGETHER, IMITATE and RESEMBLE mean. We defined each word and gave an example sentence. We used them frequently in our discussions. We also worked on story words,
CUB, JOEY and PUP in the animal baby world. The students created lists of animals and what their baby is called. We read aloud our pre-decodable, "I Can, We Can." The students continue to work on tracking words and pictures in a sentence using their pointing finger. The students worked on responding and retelling parts of our read aloud thinking story, "The Bundle of Sticks." We read our other pre-decodable. "We Can," and focused on our sight words and comprehension. The students really enjoyed this weeks work stations. While I worked with small groups, the students also worked in rotating small groups on reading a story and retelling it to a partner and drawing a picture/writing--Creating an Mm mural looking for and cutting out pictures and labeling them--Playing an upper and lowercase letter match game--creating a family sizes graph using paper dolls. Our table managers did a great job setting up, controlling the noise and helping resolve conflicts in the table group. We also had several opportunities for movement.
Math: The students continue to work on number recognition 0-20. Each students made their own set of number cards. They put them in order, played a matching game with a partner and played what number is missing game. We continued our work on reinforcing recognizing a penny and its value. We discussed using the cents sign symbol and played a penny power game. The students are beginning to understand the concept of place value. We played the Teen Partner Game where the students recognized that each teen number is 10 plus a single digit. The students learned to play Spin a Number with partners to reinforce reading numbers and counting spaces. We worked on concept words first, middle and last, same and different and greater than and less or fewer than.
Writing: The students continue to work on using their writing prompts from the Treasures book. We continue to reinforce our Frog Jump letters --F,E,D,P,B and R. The students are using their sight words in their journal entries. We continue to work on beginning sentence structure, spacing between words in a sentence and punctuation and the end of a sentence. Students are creating more detailed drawings. We want to begin our sentences on the left side and start them with a capital letter. Many students are using their inventive or phonetic spelling. We are listening for sounds at the beginning , middle and ending of words.
Literature: "How do Apples Grow?" "Yo? Yes!" "ABC Rhymes," "A Helpful Alphabet," "The Apple Tree," "My Family," "Johnny Appleseed story 1 and 2," "Apples, Apples, Apples."
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