Week 3 in Review

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Reader's Workshop was certainly a highlight this week! We passed our 20 minute goal for our Reading Stamina which means that next week Mrs. Doran is going to start meeting with us in small groups.   Our homework will begin Monday and she is making books for us based on information she got from our kindergarten teachers. She will have a guest teacher on Tuesday so she can do some reading testing with us and learn more about where we are so she can plan her instruction.  This week we focused on "Accuracy" which means reading the right word.  We added more skills to our CAFE board that focused on Accuracy.  Mrs. D. told us that even really good readers sometimes use their finger to keep their space and not skip lines. We did a great job practicing these skills this week.

Similarly we are building our stamina in Writer's Workshop and we have been learning to stretch our words (segment them) to write the sounds we hear.  We also are using our word journals and other places where we know 'book spelling' may be to help us with our notebooks.  We love sharing our writing with each other.

 We do a lot of work with word families in first grade.  Mrs. D. doesn't always review this on her blog, but this is one example of what we did this week.  We have a "Word Family Songbook" that has many word family words in it!  A word family is a group of letters like "at" that can help us learn many words (bat, cat, splat...etc). This is a way we work on spelling in first grade.

 We also practiced working in partnerships this week.  Mrs. D. has a fun way of partnering us up for activities (ask us about it).  We talk about books this way and also talk about our plans in writing for the day which helps us.

Did you know last week was Constitution Day? We learned what the Constitution is.  In first grade language, Mrs. Doran explained that it is a set of rules for our country.  She also read us the Preamble (beginning) of the constitution and we talked about what it meant.  The men who lived a long time ago and wrote the Constitution talked a little different than we do today. We learned the Preamble by listening to THIS song by Schoolhouse Rock.

We did a lot of math workshop games and had fun working in our kid kits.  Mrs. D. was very excited with how independent we have gotten with this because it has allowed her to meet with each of us individually to get some more information on what we know about math. She has about four more students to work with and that will help her plan for small group work next week.

 We also went to the computer lab for math with Mrs. Doran.  We learned how to log into the Everyday Math Workshop which you can access on the side of Mrs. Doran's blog under "Links". Getting 21 students logged on to the computer with their own passwords was stressful but in the end we all got there and had some time to 'play' the math games we've been doing in the classroom.

 In Social Studies we continue to learn about families.  We learned two new words that many of us didn't know.  Ask us what 'relatives' and 'siblings' are.  Next week we will be learning about past, present and future and we have a fun timeline homework assignment that will come home on Monday so make sure to open our homework bags right away on Monday to see what we will need to do.

With our fifth grade buddies we learned more about each other using "Glyphs".  We talked about our favorite things to do in school and based on our answers, we designed a backpack.  By looking at the backpack's color, button, and pocket and the "Glyph Key," you could learn a lot about us without even talking.

HAPPY 7TH BIRTHDAY LUKE!!
We had a great time celebrating with you!

 We didn't just celebrate Luke's birthday this week, we also celebrated good choices. Two of our students earned PBS slips.  PBS stands for Positive Behavior Support.  Mrs. D. caught both Daniela and Iden being respectful this week.  Our school will be starting a PBS blog soon with information about PBS and weekly updates.
During our classroom meeting we also learned a new coping skill called "Self-Talk." This is a skill we can use when someone says something mean to us or hurts our feelings.  In our mind we can remind ourselves that we are smart, funny and wonderful.  We had fun practicing this skill.

 Finally we ended the week with a special Mystery Reader.  Josh's mom came in and read us a really GROSS book (that we loved so much we had her read it twice!).  Josh's mom has worked with Mrs. D. the last two years and will help organize our parties and classroom volunteers.  More information will be coming home next week.

As always, much more happened in Room 119 than what you see on this blog, so make sure you take a look at the extra pictures in the slide show below.

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