September 17th-21st

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Permission slips for our first field trip of the year were sent home in totes on Thursday.  Please remember to sign and return them as soon as possible.  If you would like to chaperone, let me know!

Russell School is having a contest to see which classroom can collect the most Box Tops and Labels for Education.  The classroom that collects the most Box Tops will win an extra recess.  The classroom that collects the most Labels for Education will win a movie.  For each winning classroom, the teacher will also win a basket of supplies.  The contest runs from now until October 12th!  So send those box tops and labels in!

Next Monday, September 24th, is an early release day!

Our Special Schedule:

Monday:  library

Tuesday:  Spanish

Wednesday:  P.E. (remember those sneakers!)

Thursday:  art

Friday:  music

This week in...

Phonics:  We are studying the short a and short i sound.  Today, we worked with the following words:  has, wag, sat, had, bad, fix, six, him, will, if, can, and hit.  We listened to the word, identified the sounds, and then sorted them into categories.  After we sorted them, we practiced spelling them with a partner.

Vocabulary:  Our new vocabulary words of the week are:  tomorrow, different, groan, excited, carefully, and whisper.  We'll be working together to figure out what these words mean and how to use them in a sentence.  Then, we'll search for them in the short story called School is Starting by Josh Singh.

Comprehension:  We will be focusing on analyzing story structure, characters, and setting.  We'll practice using these skills while we read David's New Friends by Pat Mora.  

Grammar:  We will be focusing on beginning sentences with a capital letter and ending them with the appropriate punctuation mark. 

Writing:  We've introduced the idea of using our writer's eye.  When we use our writer's eye we are looking for very specific things.  So far, our writer's eyes are focused on having finger spaces between our words, starting with a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence, and ending our sentences with the appropriate punctuation mark.  

Daily 5:  We have now added the third part of our Daily 5.  Before we talked about Read to Self and Work on Writing.  Today we began to talk about Read to Someone.  Take a look at our "I" chart below.

Here are some of the teaching posters that we also talked about.  These will be available in the room for us to refer to.  

During this week, we will be talking about how to choose partners, how to choose books, where to sit in the room, and the three different ways to read to someone.  We'll start building our stamina by practicing for three minutes.  Each day we will try to increase our stamina by one minute. 

CAFE:  So far we have three strategies added to our CAFE menu.  We have check for understanding (to help us with our comprehension), cross checking (to help us with accuracy), and tune into interesting words (to expand our vocabulary).  This week we will continue to tune into interesting words while we listen to our read aloud book Charlotte's Web by E.B. White.  So far we have tuned into some pretty interesting words.  Here are a few examples:  objectionable, salutations, gnawing, thoroughly, cautiously, and detested.

Here is our CAFE board.  We'll continue to add reading strategies to it throughout the year.

Math:  We are continuing our work with graphing.  So far students have had a chance to collect data and create graphs both individually and with a partner.  We've practiced making bar graphs and pictures graphs.  Each day, we continue to collect data about ourselves so that we can get to know each other better.  Here is an example of one of our graphs:

This week we will continue to investigate all kinds of graphs and practice sorting data into categories so that we can turn the data into a graph.

Social Studies:  We are continuing to build our classroom community.  This week we'll be taking a look at blue, green, yellow, and red behavior when we are in line, learning on the rug, and during goal time.  We'll also have a chance to create a flow chart for what to do if we have a problem with a friend.

As I'm sure some of you may have heard, last Friday we unveiled the fabulous "B" bucks and tokens that we'll be using to manage our behavior.  There will be a newsletter going home this week that will give you some more details about how this works.  I tried to send home to you today but alas the printers were not cooperating with me.  I'm hoping to get them home to you before the end of the week!

I hope you have a joy-filled week!