Happy 1st day of Fall!

Happy 1st day of Fall!
Don't forget--NO SCHOOL ON MONDAY!

Check out our learning from this week...

Fundations: we learned the letter name, sound and correct letter formation for the lowercase c and o.  Please use the following verbal prompts when practicing at home:

c-over, around, open

o-over, around, close

Check the Friday Folder for the weekly Fundations packet to find out more ways we'd love your help at home.

Shared Reading: this week our new word wall word was at.  We read 2 big books that featured this word, as well as our older words: Look at me and We are.  

In the pictures below they are highlighting the word at in their own copies of these books. 

 Next week's new word wall word:

is

Please help your child practice at home as we will begin weekly spelling tests in October.

Daily 5: ask your child what Daily 5 center they went to this week.  They currently go to one center a day, but next week we will be moving to 2 centers a day.  We have the following centers so far: classroom library, books on cd, computers, writing, pocketchart, lacing letters, whiteboards, puzzles, name writing and friends name books. 

You can also ask your child about Read to Self time and what we do during this time.  We also do this daily right after our Daily 5 centers.

Math: please see the weekly homelinks in the Friday Folder to further extend their learning at home.  In the pictures below they are working with a partner describing how their shape cards are similar and different. We also worked a lot on creating, extending and explaining patterns this week.  

Writing: this week we began learning where writers get ideas for stories.  We read the wonderful book Wilfred Gordon McDonald Partridge by Mem Fox to help us.  In this story a little boy learns what memories are and that memories can be happy, sad, as precious as gold, scary, etc.  We then talked about how we can write about memories we have, from now or long ago.  We created this chart to help us when we are stuck on what to write about. The kids came up with all of these wonderful ideas for stories!
Please know that "writing" right now mostly consists of drawing and that is ok!  Drawing is a huge part of writing.  Some kiddos are starting to label their drawings with sounds they hear and that is great.  For example: one little boy was writing about playing with his power ranger toys and he wrote "pr" for power rangers.  We made a HUGE deal about this and hopefully more will start to do this as well.  Next week my lessons will really focus on doing our best to write the sounds we hear to add words to our drawings. I will be modeling this daily. 

Recess Fun!