Flag, writing conferences & so much more!

I can't believe this is the last week of 1st quarter and it is almost November!! Where has the year gone so far! We had another busy week trying to wrap up the quarter and we got a lot accomplished. Take a look below at what we did this week.

We are continuing to develop our calendar/ morning meeting skills. Each day we have our friend who was chosen as the "treasure counter" from the previous day be our secret spy and choose a treasure counter for that day. In order to be chosen they need to be looking at the number line, pointing to the numbers and counting with us how many days we have been in school. This person gets to write the number on our number card and are also our "weather watcher" who records what the weather is for the day on our chart. We have also continued to discuss how many days we have been in school and what that equals in money. We have started doing the Pledge of Allegiance in the mornings as well. More about this below.

In order to get our portfolios ready for conferences and allow the kids to have more ownership over their work, we made covers for them. We wrote our names and they really took their time shading to make it look nice.

During our writing period the kids have been conferencing with a partner. This has helped them to gain insight on their strengths and needs in their own writing as well as give the same suggestions to their partners. They tell their partner two stars and a wish about their story. Two stars are two things that they enjoyed about their partners writing skill and their wish is something that they want their partner to do in their writing. After they do this we choose a couple groups to share their two stars and a wish about their partners story with the class. Then they have the opportunity to work on their writing and add the suggestions their friend gave them.

Since we have started doing the Pledge of Allegiance, the kids have noticed that we don't have a flag in our classroom. They decided that we needed to change that and wanted to make their own! We looked at pictures of the flag to figure out what colors we needed and how we would go about doing this. They started by ripping red, white and blue construction paper. We then figured out how many lines we needed, what color they should be and about how big the blue box should be and we outlined it in pencil on our paper. Below are some pictures of me modeling how to put the right amount of glue on their papers and glue it on our flag. Each child then got a turn to come up and try it. There is a picture below of what we have done so far. We have a lot of work still left to do but we have gotten a pretty good start and it is going to look really great when we are done! 

We also finished our Green and Orange color mosaics this week! We just have to make the label for Orange. We still have to make the mosaics for purple, brown, black, white and pink! They are turning out awesome so far!

 

In order to tie up the quarter we also worked on some things that many of our kids were struggling with. We practiced counting syllables in words by putting our hand under our chin and each time your chin moves that is a syllable. We also practiced counting, recognizing and drawing shapes and writing numbers.


Have a great week and don't forget our student-led conferences are November 6th, 7th & 8th. Look for a paper this week to come home with the time and date of your child's conference!
Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant

Short but busy week!

Even though we had a short week, it was a busy one! When I say this to the kids in the morning they have begun saying, "Again!" We got a lot done in the short amount of time we had this week! We added new workstations, created and put up our number cards for the children to use as a resource, finished our yellow mosaics and sent our yellow color book home. We also added a couple things to our calendar time, talked about our achievement rings and voted on what we wanted our class reward to be.
Let me explain this. As a class we are trying to earn 30 buckeyes (one for each of our friends). We earn buckeyes when we get whole class compliments in the hallway, during specials, everyone is on task and working hard during writing/work stations, etc. We only have 5 left to earn and the kids are very excited! We wrote down some ideas that they would like for their reward and we talked about how they had to be reasonable options. Some of their ideas included a pizza party, ice cream party, ipad party, music party, art party and the winner was Ice Cream Party! Once we earn the rest of our buckeyes I will send something home to let you know when it will be.

Here are our math workstations that we added this week: a puzzle where they have to put the pieces in number order in order to make a picture, using a scale to weigh different math materials, sorting candy corn pieces into jars with the corresponding number on it, shape puzzles and pumpkin cards where the students had to match the number, number word, and the correct matching number set of pumpkins.

Here are our literacy workstations that we added this week: tracing our friends names to learn how to spell them, filling in the missing letter on alphabet cards, and magnetic alphabet letters.

We have finished our yellow mosaic! The children worked really hard on it and it turned out great! The kids also showed that they were confident with our yellow color song so we practiced reading our books with the music. They were then able to take them home so they could share it with you!

We started our writer's workshop this week! We talked about the basic skills that we need as writers such as; using two finger spaces after each word, capital letters at the beginning, using our resources to find how to make letters correctly and spell our sight words correctly, using periods at the end of our sentences, and making our illustrations match our words. Right now most of the kids are working on writing words by using just a few sounds that they hear instead of every sound. They hear consonant sounds first and then the vowel sounds develop later. So for example you might notice your child writing "cr" for the word car and that is normal! We have been encouraging the students to sound out words and write what they hear instead of just telling them how to spell a word. You can continue to do this at home to help encourage their inventive spelling. As far as what they write about, it is pretty open and they can choose something that they are interested in. I hope you begin to see your child writing more at home and gain self confidence in this area! I am excited to see what they come up with for their stories and share them with you all

We also worked on our number cards and put them up to use as a resource in our classroom. We made the number, wrote the number word, put the correct number of stickers on it and put tally marks to represent that number as well. They turned out great!

On Thursday we also went down to Mrs. Atkin's classroom to sing, dance with her friends as well as listened to a couple stories on their promethean board. Both of our classes really enjoy this time that we spend together each week!

During our calendar time we have now added this place value pocket chart. We have been keeping track of how many days we have been in school and now we are looking at how that number looks in hundreds, tens and ones. We have also added a weather chart where we have a "weather watcher" and they mark what the weather is like for that day.

We will be starting these achievement rings with the kids soon so I explained to the class what they meant. I will be sending a note home to explain them further but each bead represents a different standard and when the students meet that standard, they will get to add the bead to their ring. So when they are able to recognize all of the uppercase and lowercase letters they will add a bead to their ring, when they know all of the letter sounds they will add a different color bead to their ring, and so on. 

Here are some of our friends enjoying the nice fall weather outside! I had to share these cute pictures! :)

Have a great week and I hope to see you all at our scavenger hunt next Saturday (11am at Cox Arboretum)! Also, Thursday is picture retake day and Friday is pajama day. 

Mrs. Brittany Garrabrant