A Glimpse of our Week

This week the letters n and m were introduced during Fundations. The children worked hard at practice writing the letters in the sky, on their whiteboards, and in their notebooks. We also had fun finding our new letters in our morning messages through out the week and circling them. On Wednesday we brainstormed words that began with the letters n and m. Ask your child to think of words that begin with the letters n and m.


During math this week, we continued to explore pattern blocks, geoboards, polydrons, unifix cubes, and bugs. We also learned a new game called Dot Bingo. This game is a great way for the children to learn the dot patterns found on dice, and the many ways numbers 1-6 can be represented by numeral, dice pattern, ten frames, and math hands. In this game, the children play with a partner. The first player rolls the die. Then, the player checks to see if the number of dots rolled is on his or her own bingo card and places a counter on one of the squares that represents the number rolled. Then it becomes the second players turn. The game continues until one of the partners has covered a row or column.


During one of the math lesson's this week, we said good bye to our shapes using the attribute cards (curved sides, 3 corners, and large). The children learned about justifying their answer. Justifying means telling how you know what something is or what the answer is. For example: "I know this is a triangle because it has 3 sides and 3 corners." Using the word BECAUSE is very important when explaining our math thinking. We also have a poster in the classroom reminding us to use this math habit.




This week we created spiders and ladybugs to use for this month's calendar markers. Once they were created, we voted as a class what pattern we would like to see on the calender. The majority of the class decided on a AABB pattern (ladybug, ladybug, spider, spider). We are also tracking the weather in Our Month in School chart. So far, we have had more cloudy days than sunny days!


As we continued to learn about apples, the children learned about the different apple parts through a read aloud. Then, they labeled a diagram of an apple and colored it. Next week, we will be doing some more projects and activities around apples.


We had learned a new sight word last week: is. We read the poem Fall is Here by Helen H. Moore. After, the children took turns coming to the poem and circling the word is, which showed up 8 times! Then, we created our own Fall Is Here poem and illustrated what we wrote. Many of the children said fall is trick or treating. Ask your child what he or she said fall is to them.

The children have been working hard in writer's workshop creating books! They have been learning how to be independent during this time as I conference with children about their books. This includes knowing what to do when they have completed a book. See if your child can tell you the 3 things they can do when they think they are done with their book.

The children also learned about partner reading. Partner reading is when individual children are partnered up with another child in the class and they read a book together. At first the books are books that are familiar to them and/or that they have made in the class (for example, they each made a version of the book The Very Hungry Caterpillar). This week, we learned about the different ways we could read to each other and practiced a couple of times.

Here are the different ways we learned how to read with our partner:

1. One partner reads the book aloud to the other partner. Then, the other partner reads the book.

2. One partner reads one page. The other partner reads the next page. And so on.

3. Echo reading: One partner reads one page, then their partner echos (repeats) it back.


Here is an example of partner reading: