November 2-6

This week student’s read our weekly Journeys story, A Cupcake Party. This story’s genre was fantasy and we discussed the difference between different types of fiction writing. Fantasy has events and characters that we would not see in real life and realistic fiction has characters and events that we could see in real life. A Cupcake Party also reinforced our spelling pattern of the week which was words with short u. The words were definitely more challenging this week because many of them including final cluster sounds such as -mp, -nd and -st. Many times young readers will forget that they hear 4 sounds in a word which means they should have 4 letters in the word. We worked on this in our centers and during our whole group phonics lessons. In math we are learning about odd and even numbers. We used dominoes to find numbers that were even and numbers that were odd. We added the numbers from both sides of the domino to get a sum. One student made an excellent observation and said “I notice that when we add two odd numbers together we get an even sum”! I love when they come to these conclusions on their own and I absolutely love when they get excited about their learning. We also had centers in math which allowed us to practice using a straight edge (ruler) to create designs and shapes. Using a ruler can be difficult for small hands because as they draw a line down the length of the ruler they forget to keep pressure on the ruler so the ruler doesn’t move. This is a fun activity to practice at home as well. 🙂 Another activity we did in centers was use pattern blocks to fill in bigger shapes with smaller shapes. Students found different ways to fill the same shape with different pattern blocks.

In PBL Morah Donna is talking showing the class how quilts are made. Since they are learning about what life was like long ago, this is an excellent activity to showcase what women would do while the men were out working in the fields and gathering food for the families. Morah Donna had a quilt she is working on for a friend and she asked that the students remove their shoes before looking at the quilt, since she had the quilt laid out on the floor. It was too cute when I walked into my room and saw that my student’s had “disappeared”.

We also had our CJDS elections this week. Students listened to the speeches of the candidates and then made a choice on who they wanted to vote for. We talked about how voting should be private and we don’t tell who we are voting for and we shouldn’t ask others who they are voting for. It’s a great learning experience for them to learn about how lucky we are to be able to vote. 🙂

Have a wonderful weekend. Go Panthers!! Shabbat Shalom!