Week 10 in Review

Greetings from room 119 and thank you for checking in on our learning adventures! Families, please remember to turn in your Fun Run money (if you haven't already). Also, conferences are next Thursday. Mrs. D. will not have a printed copy of our report cards for you. If you have any questions about how to access report cards on Skyward, please contact Mrs. D. At conferences, she is planning on sharing what she sees as our strengths and the goals she has set for us for this next marking period.
Goals that we always work on in our class are behavior, following directions and being respectful. Our classroom rules are that, "We will respect ourselves, respect each other, respect our class and school." This week something very exciting happened... OUR ENTIRE CLASS STAYED GREEN! Mrs. D. was so happy and so were we! It was a great feeling to know that we are capable of awesome behaviors! Speaking of awesome behaviors, Elliot and Calynn got their PBS tickets drawn last week so we were able to listen to their PBS stories on the news and they both did a great job!


This week we started working on visualization or making movies in our minds. When we can see a story in our head, it helps us comprehend better. One activity we did this week was illustrate Mrs. D.'s daughter's favorite song. We had heard it before but this time we really focused on the words in the song and saw a story in our head. If you didn't see Mrs. D's mid-week blog, you can see the great video we did by clicking HERE.

In addition to our Writer's Workshop, we also began writing each morning about the show and tell we see. Each of us will get a chance to bring in a show and tell to share with the class. We then all write about the show and tell recording all of the details that we remember. This means we have to be good listeners and detailed writers. At the end of each week, Mrs. D. sends all our pages home in a book (with a picture of us with our show and tell on the cover). She had to make extra lines on the papers because some of us needed more space to write all those details!

Speaking of going the extra mile, this week we learned about "Total-Part-Part" diagrams and how we can use them to help us solve problems. Mrs. D. started out slowly with all of us, using dominoes to help illustrate how to complete these problems. For example on one side of the domino there may be three dots, two on the other and their total is five. We ALL picked up on in right away and some of us asked Mrs. D. to stump us. She was unable to! Even this problem where she gave Luke the number 142 as the total and one part of the problem (43). He took his time and was able to solve it! Wow! Way to go Luke!
Mrs. D. often uses examples to teach us. To help better explain digraphs she used an illustration. In the picture above we call the square a square and the triangle a triangle~ BUT when we put them together we get something totally different... a house! Similarly when we put a "t" and an "h" together we get a totally different sound. We did a good job coming up with words that started with the "th" sound and we also added them to our word wall. Mrs. D. will be putting these words on cards so we can practice reading these high frequency words.

Mrs. D. is so excited with the progress we are making in our Reader's Workshop. We are building our stamina and she keeps challenging us and we are getting better and quicker at using our decoding strategies! Still it is REALLY important that we read at home to you. The books that she sends home each week should not take us long to read so reading one each night before bed would be a great idea to help us build fluency and confidence in our reading. The best way to become a better reader, is to READ!

We ended our week like we do every week with a special Mystery Reader. Jack's mom was scheduled to be our Mystery Reader but when Jack was sick, Mrs. D. didn't know what to do... so she called her parents! We were really excited when one of the clues was that the Mystery Reader was someone's dad (we have only had moms so far be the Mystery Readers but would love to hear from dads, nanas, papas, aunties... etc). We were SHOCKED when we learned it was HER dad that came in. He read one of the books he read to Mrs. D. when she was little, The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. He did a great job and was really impressed with what a great audience we were. He told us he reads this blog too and loves hearing about all the things we learn about! Because Mrs. D. always takes a picture of the Mystery Reader with their favorite first grader, she needed some help from us... Many of us took a picture of her and her dad and thankfully one came out clear! Don't forget to check out the extra movies and slideshow below and leave us a comment! Mrs. D. will share the comments with us at school!

To watch our Family Tree video on You Tube, click HERE.

To watch our Thankful Turkey video on You Tube, click HERE.

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