A Glimpse of Our Week

After ease-in stations, we always move into morning meeting. Morning meeting allows children to work on social skills and it helps set the tone for respectful learning in the classroom, which extends beyond morning meeting. During morning meeting, we always start with a greeting. Then, an activity or a song follows. Sometimes morning meeting involves a share session too. As a class we read our morning message, which is a great closure to our morning meeting.

This week's greeting had me going around the circle and giving a friendly handshake to each child and saying "good morning" to him or her. The children could either greet me back or not saying anything. Toward the end of the week, most of the children were feeling comfortable greeting me back.

We also sang a song titled Hickety Pickety Bumble Bee which helps us learn each other's names. It's also a great song for working on syllables. We will continue to sing this song next week. See if your child can sing it for you.

This week, we created our morning meeting rules. These were rules that we all agreed to follow during morning meeting or even during whole group instruction. Ask your child to name at least one rule.

We've started talking about our classroom rules and how they will help us reach our hopes and dreams for the school year. Next week, we will finalize our rules and illustrate our hopes and dreams.

In math, we've been practicing writing numbers 1-5 using whiteboards (after some guided discovery), on the carpet and in the air with our magical marker and also on friends backs. We learned some fun rhymes to help us remember how to form each number correctly. You will get a copy of the rhymes at the Curriculum Night on September 22nd. In the meantime, ask your child to share some of the rhymes with you.

As we've continued with Number Corner this week, we had our first lesson from our Bridges math program. In this lesson, the children each received a card with a shape on it. Then, the children sorted themselves into groups by various attributes: color, then shape, then color and shape. After, they had to identify if their shape had curved sides, 4 corners, or 3 corners. Ask your child what shapes have 4 corners.

This week we read the book My Map Book. After reading this book, we looked closely at how the author illustrated a map of her heart. We noticed all the different topics she could write about. Then, I showed them My Map of My Heart and all the different topics that I could write about during Writer's Workshop. The children were excited to take on the challenge of creating their own map of their heart. The children were able to come up with 5 topics they could write about. Their hearts will be placed in their writer's workshop folder as a reference if they need an idea to write about. Next week we will officially begin writer's workshop!

During our literacy time, a lesson was taught around the introduction to sound. We looked at how babies use sounds to communicate, which eventually these sounds turn into words. We learned what a vowel was, how many there are in the alphabet, and that every word has to have a vowel. We also learned that two of the smallest words in our language are vowels: a and I. After, the children found what vowels were in their first name and counted how many they had. Throughout the week, many children were noticing all the vowels in the morning messages. These children catch on quickly! Ask your child to name the vowels in their first name.

Below are some pictures that were taken throughout the week.

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