Fall is here at last!

Our phonics skill this week was "bossy e."  He got his name because he likes to boss the other vowels around! The bossy e changes the vowel from short to long by saying "SAY YOUR NAME!"  The children really enjoyed screaming this as loud as they could! We practiced sorting, writing, and reading bossy e words all week long.

This week we were introduced to our final literacy station, Word Work.  At this station we practiced reading and writing words and sentences. We used magnets, white boards, playdough, stamps, markers, and word family cubes. The children loved this station!  We started out the week practicing it for 5 minutes.  They begged and begged to try it for longer, so by the end of the week we were up to 12 minutes! On Friday we had our first real practice with all 5 literacy stations.  They did GREAT!

In writing we are working on writing about small moments from our lives.  We started out the year writing "watermelon" topics.  These are large topics so we decided to zoom in one moment and create a "seed" story. (Ex: Instead of writing about a birthday party you can zoom in on your chocolate cake with strawberry frosting!) Writing a seed story will encourage us to stay on topic and include detail in our stories.  This week we worked on zooming in and creating a web with our seed topic.

 

In math we began talking about subtraction.  We learned that in subtraction the order of the numbers matters! We also learned that subtraction means taking something away.  At the end of the week we started a mix practice of both subtraction and addition story problems.  Our Unit 2 test will be next week!

We were super excited about two new additions to our classroom this week.  First, we welcomed Frankie the Frog.  Frankie the Frog will visit a star Daily 5 student each day.  Frankie the Frog enjoys visiting students who are working hard during our literacy stations.  Congratulations to Andrew, Ben, Olivia H. Felicia, and Hank for getting Frankie the Frog this week!

Another addition to our classroom is the shark! Thank you to our generous PTA for providing the classrooms with shark vacuums to share! We started a "clean up crew" at the end of the day to give the students the chance to use the shark if they wish. :)

Have a great weekend!
Mrs. Donohue