Week 5 in Review

Greetings from Room 119!  We continue to work hard and as a group we are starting to make good decisions which earned us a free recess.  When we get good reports from PE, music, art or media center we get a piece to add to a potato head.  When the potato head is complete, we get a free quick recess to celebrate.  Many of us are still struggling with following directions and staying on task.  Be sure to review the calendar that Mrs. D. sent home last week to know more about how we are behaving.  If you ever have any questions, don't forget to contact Mrs. Doran.

We had two birthdays to celebrate this week!  We enjoyed singing to Zahraa and Hailey and Ollie the owl got to visit both girls' homes.

We continued to work on our math rotations this week and were lucky to have our wonderful parent volunteers come in and help us.  We also took our first 'test'.  We actually LOVED it because Mrs. Doran gave us our own little 'office' so we could work privately.  We continue to work on counting by 2s, 5s and 10s and working on story problems and how to solve them in different ways.  There are more pictures from our Math Workshop in the video below.

This week we started Readers' Workshop.  Mrs. Doran introduced a CAFE board to us.  Like a real Cafe' our CAFE is a menu of strategies that we can use to become better readers.  The letters in CAFE stand for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency and Expanded Vocabulary.  We looked closely at two strategies to help us with our accuracy. The first was to look at the pictures for clues to solve unknown words and the second was to use our finger as we read so that we don't lose our place.  The more we read, the better we will become so continue to listen to us read the book Mrs. D. sent home and remember to read to us.  Many of us really enjoyed the Magic Tree House series that Mrs. D. began reading to us.  Now she is introducing us to a new series (Bailey School Kids).

We've really improved our reading stamina and we are also working on our writing stamina.  Mrs. D. gave us a portfolio piece to write on Friday.  She noticed that what we do in Writer's Workshop (use spaces, sounds and a detail matching picture) did not transfer over to our portfolio piece.  We are going to work on carrying over what we learn in writing to all aspects of school.  We will continue to work on this.

We ended the week with a special Mystery Reader.  Will's mom came in and read "The Cat in the Hat" to us.  We were a great audience and loved guessing Dr. Seuss's familiar rhyme.  Mystery Readers are something we certainly look forward to in Room 119.  If you haven't yet signed up for someone special to read, please do.  You can click HERE to find available dates.  Mrs. D. wants every one of us to have someone special sign up to read so that she can open up the opportunity for more people to read to us.

As always, this is a sneak peek at what we did this week.  To see more, you can click HERE or look at the video below.  Please remember that there is an important bond election coming up.  To learn more about what is (and is not) covered in the bond, please click HERE and share this information with others.