We have launched our Readers Workshop and are "Growing like Beanstalks" already! We are choosing reading spots and shopping for "just right" books. I am evaluating student reading levels with ongoing informal and formal assessments. We are building stamina and reading more and more everyday. I will be conferring with students daily to identify their goals for becoming more proficient readers and these conferences will naturally build their discussion and collaboration skills. Some of the teaching points we have learned and practiced as readers are: reading in bigger scoops, stopping to think about what we've read and retelling the important details in our minds, and jotting down important details about the main character and or plot on sticky notes. We are also becoming "Flexible word solvers". We "roll up our sleeves" when words are tricky to figure them out and we never give up. We can figure out unknown words by using the context of the story, looking through the whole word, looking for small words inside a big word, taking a guess and then checking the word for chunks and sounds to see if our guess matches, rereading to see if the word and sentence sound right, looking for prefixes and suffixes, and realizing some letters, and even groups of letters, make many sounds so we may have to try different sounds in a word. Please continue to encourage your child to read every night.
We have also launched Math Workshop this year!! We are having fun learning lots of different strategies to become more fluent with our math facts. We practice these everyday in math workshop stations. Some strategies you can practice at home are adding on with 0,1, 2, and 3, using doubles, doubles plus 1, ways to make ten, making ten from 8 and 9, using 10 to add, and finding key words in word problems to understand if we need to find a missing part of the whole in a problem. We will be starting the next unit on Place Value next week.
We are becoming great young authors as we learn how to write entertaining narrative stories. We are using entertaining beginnings to grab our audience's attention from the start, we are stopping action to describe our story's setting by "painting a picture with words" and using very specific instead of general words and sentences, and are creating suspense that is leading us to the main event. Stay tuned for our spooky haunted house stories.
We will begin our first unit on Properties of Matter in Science shortly.
We are having a blast in Room 1 collaborating , communicating, being creative, and using our critical thinking skills!
We have also launched Math Workshop this year!! We are having fun learning lots of different strategies to become more fluent with our math facts. We practice these everyday in math workshop stations. Some strategies you can practice at home are adding on with 0,1, 2, and 3, using doubles, doubles plus 1, ways to make ten, making ten from 8 and 9, using 10 to add, and finding key words in word problems to understand if we need to find a missing part of the whole in a problem. We will be starting the next unit on Place Value next week.
We are becoming great young authors as we learn how to write entertaining narrative stories. We are using entertaining beginnings to grab our audience's attention from the start, we are stopping action to describe our story's setting by "painting a picture with words" and using very specific instead of general words and sentences, and are creating suspense that is leading us to the main event. Stay tuned for our spooky haunted house stories.
We will begin our first unit on Properties of Matter in Science shortly.
We are having a blast in Room 1 collaborating , communicating, being creative, and using our critical thinking skills!