Week 6 in Review

In room 119, we are writers! This week we took a Developmental Writing Assessment to show Mrs. Doran everything we can do. We write every day in Writer's Workshop and often complain when Mrs. Doran tells us we have to stop and share so we can go to lunch! Not only do we share our writing with our class, we also have some of it posted in the hallway for others in the school to read. Mrs. Doran bought plastic sleeves to keep our writing in and then we put it in the binders we brought in September. We like to look back at the work in our binders and see how our writing has changed even in the last month!
Speaking of writing, many of us are working on adding more details to our writing pieces. One way we can do this, is by adding more precise words. We worked with our fifth grade buddies this week and looked for precise words and adjectives in a poem we read. We also wrote a poem with our buddies. Since learning about adjectives, we have been mini-detectives finding adjectives everywhere. One place we heard a lot of adjectives was in a book Mrs. Doran read us called, "The Fierce Pumpkin."

When we heard an adjective in the book, we had Mrs. Doran write it in a new poem we wrote describing pumpkins. Mrs. Doran was impressed that we were able to understand what most of the words meant and that we were able to pick out so many adjectives! We started using some of the precise words we learned in the classroom. By using more precise words, we will also start using them in our writing and we are a room FULL of wonderful writers!
Did you know that Monday was Columbus Day? We learned about Columbus in our Scholastic News Magazine. This is a publication that is purchased for us by our wonderful PTA! (If you haven't joined the PTA, you still can!) We learned a lot of interesting facts about Christopher Columbus and can read you what we learned in the Scholastic Magazine that we brought home. We also drew maps showing the route Columbus sailed and learned a song (that you can hear in one of the videos below).

Mrs. Doran has been so happy that we are writing our names with one capital and the rest lower-case, that she let us finger paint our names to show what we can do. We absolutely loved this change in routine and had fun painting our names and then adding a fun picture.

Mrs. Doran has noticed that many of us do not form our letters correctly and to help with this, we are going to begin practicing our letter formations in shaving cream. She is going to buy trays this weekend so we can start next week. If you have some shaving cream you can send in, that would be wonderful! She had her own daughter practicing writing 8s in shaving cream at her house and she learned that practice makes permanent. Writing in shaving cream, erasing and writing again will really help make permanent the correct way to form our letters.

While writing uses fine motor skills, so do other activities like cutting. We did some cutting this week when we created our very own jack-o-lanterns. Mrs. Doran modeled the steps to make a jack-o-lantern and we did a very nice job following directions. All of our pumpkins are very different, unique and special, just like us!

Mrs. Doran hung our pumpkins in the hallway next to the class poem we wrote so that everyone who visits our school can see them. It is hard to capture everything we do in a week in pictures and words. It feels like every moment we are learning and growing from telling time and counting money, to solving problems and using good manners. We've created an amazing classroom environment and our school has noticed... Our class was awarded the first PBS (Positive Behavior Support) class award which means that other staff in the building noticed how wonderful we are and wrote us special 'tickets' for being responsible, respectful, resilient, ready and reliable. Mrs. Doran will write more about this next week!

Fridays are always special in room 119 because we are visited by a Mystery Reader. Mrs. Doran gives us clues throughout the day and we try and guess who our mystery reader is. We were thrown for a loop because most of us assumed that the Mystery Reader was a mom, but this time it was a dad!

Griffin's dad came in to read to us today and did a great job. We were a wonderful audience and certainly showed that though we are young, we know that being respectful and kind to others is the way to go.

Often times teachers tell the bigger kids to be examples for the younger kids, but the staff in our building has pointed out OUR positive behavior to the big kids. We have a choice in our behavior and we are making great choices! Make sure you tell us today how wonderful we are. You will feel good telling us, and we'll feel good hearing it!

We meet at the gathering place at the end of each day to talk about what we learned and sometimes we review favorite songs that teach us about rhyme and word families like this one...

This is the song we learned about Christopher Columbus.