September 9

It finally feels like we are getting into the swing of school and the kids are doing great! They are really picking up on the routines and transitions and are learning what our daily schedule is like day to day. In math we have started our Speed Drills and some of the kids really are enjoying them. They like to be challenged and race against themselves. I watch as they notice their improvements and love the excitement and joy in their faces when they see they have done a little better than the day before. Last week in reading workshop we read a story titled Jack and the Wolf. It is a short version of The Boy Who Cried Wolf. We talked about making inferences and using context clues to predict what characters are feeling and what might happen next. This week we are reading a nonfiction story called How Animals Communicate. This is always one of the kids’ favorite stories because there are photos of animals and most kids are huge animal lovers! In this story we continue to focus on making inferences but we are also using details in the story to understand the authors purpose. They have also been introduced to parts of a sentence…The naming part (the subject) and the telling part (predicate). This was a good transition into our writing lessons. We talked about word choice and how to choose words that create a clear picture in the readers’ minds. They learned that using adjectives can be a great way to add detail to make their story more interesting. We are working on our first stories right now. Students learned how to first come up with some “small moments” in their life that they would want to tell a story about (i.e. a family vacation, a special holiday, a favorite memory, etc.) Once they chose their “small moment” they learned how to organize their thoughts on a graphic organizer. Then they transferred those thoughts into a picture map (Draw it out map) where they drew a picture of the beginning, middle and end of their moment. Then they are going to learn how to take those pictures and graphic organizer and turn them into a story. Writing can be very hard for the little ones since they are still learning how to spell, write, hold their pencils correctly, etc. But so far I am very pleased with their progress. 🙂 Please enjoy some snapshots from our past two weeks.