It has been a busy month!!!
We have spent a lot of time learning routines and rules for our classroom and our school. We have also been getting to know each other and making many friends.
Last week, we ended our first unit in Writing Workshop. We had a party with Mrs. Biglin’s class to celebrate all our accomplishments as writers. We have learned:
We are looking forward to the launch of our new unit about Small Moments and Label Books this week.
Our next unit of study in Reading Workshop will be “Readers read, think, and talk about Emergent Story Books and invent fun things to do with them”. What is an emergent storybook? An emergent storybook has a narrative structure with characters and a plot. It has attractive illustrations that closely match the text. They often will have a repeating refrain or line throughout the text. They have dialogue, an engaging storyline, and may contain some emotional content. Emergent storybooks sometimes, but do not always rhyme. Your child will refer to them as “star books”.
We’re sure that you have lots of emergent storybooks at home. Please keep your eyes out for them. Here is a list of some of the books we’ll be focusing on:
Bunny Cakes
Caps for Sale
A Chair For My Mother
Peter’s Chair
The Mitten
Bedtime For Frances
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
Three Billy Goats Gruff
Miss Nelson Is Missing
Chrysanthemum
Harry The Dirty Dog
Swimmy
Strega Nona
If you can donate or lend any of these titles,
please let me know as soon as possible!
Our math time has also been very busy! We have been learning the routines for our Business Meeting by graphing the temperature and weather, counting the days in school, analyzing our check-in graph, and learning about the calendar. We have also been talking about simple geometric shapes, pattern blocks, and patterns. Coins were introduced and we explored ways to tell them apart (size, color, ridges on the outside).
We recently began a new unit on The Five Senses in science. We will explore all our senses by visiting the green house for labs each week.
In Open Circle, we have been playing many games to get to know each other’s names, what we have in common, and what is different about us. We all helped create our class rules and learned that they are “Nonnegotiable.” We learned how to show the “School Listening Look” and many nonverbal signals.
We met with our 4th Grade Book Buddies twice this month. We read stories together and got to know each other a little better by asking each other questions.
We had a visit from the USRFD and learned about fire safety and fire prevention. We got to see a firefighter up close and even walk inside the fire engine!
We have learned letters over the last few weeks: Cc, Oo, Aa, Dd, Gg, Qq, Ee, and Ll. Our sight word list is growing too! We have now learned: is, love, my, name, the, like, me. For an up-to-date list of our sight words we have covered, please refer to the word rings I sent home in the homework folder.
PLEASE KEEP THE RING AND THE POUCH IN THE FOLDER AT ALL TIMES! This will help them from getting lost and will allow me to add additional words each week.
Our field trip to DePiero’s farm is coming soon on October 13.
It will be a great time!