What a fun week!

What a fun and busy week! 100th Day & Valentine's Day all in the same week, oh my! 

We had a lot of fun and managed to get in some learning as well! 

A look at our learning this week...

Fundations: we worked on tapping out 3 letter words, silent/bossy e words and building sentences with our trick words of the week (aka spelling words that can't be sounded out).  We have had some tricky words the past couple of weeks (said, are, etc.) and they have done an amazing job reading and spelling them! 

Writing: Writing time is focused on the craft of writing, rather than the mechanics of writing (that's what Fundations is for).  When they naturally know how to form a letter and don't have to think on it, all of their brainpower can be put into writing a story with detail and sounding out their words. That is why it is so important to hold them accountable for forming their letters the way we have taught them.  We continue to work on making sure we include who is in the story, where the story takes place and 3 details that happened when writing.  We have moved beyond a sentence being acceptable for a story. 

Check out some of our wonderful writers below! 

Shared Reading/Spelling: we learned the poems Jack and Jill and Roses are Red and read the big book What Animals Eat to help us practice our new spelling words. We also use these books to help us apply the reading strategies we are learning in their small guided reading groups. In the photos below, we are reading our new book with a buddy.  Our buddies know to prompt us to "try again" and use our reading strategies if we get stuck on a word.  If we try and are still stuck, our buddies can help us.  I encourage you to do the same when reading at home.  While we never want them to become frustrated when trying to read, it is important they try to figure it out before we just tell them. 

Next week's new spelling words:

is

his

Math: we had a day full of math on Monday with the 100th day of school!  Everything was centered around the number 100!  I hope you enjoyed looking through everything they brought home that day!  This week we also worked on teen numbers, story problems and did a fun little math activity where we graphed conversation hearts and could eat them when finished!  Food always makes learning fun! 

Class celebrations: we had so much fun celebrating the 100th day of school on Monday and I love how many participated in dressing up!  On Tuesday, we celebrated putting forth our best effort on the i-ready assessment the other week with donuts and on Wednesday we had so much fun passing out valentines and our final class party of the year!  Thank you to Kayla Hagedorn for organizing all of the parties this year!  You can see a few photos below, but SO MANY MORE are on our class Facebook page!  Check it out! 

Due to the long weekend, and teachers working on report cards tomorrow, we are not sending home Success Ready Skills Rubrics or Friday Folders this week.  Your child does have a few papers, including their optional handwriting homework, in their daily Take Home Folder.  

More fun from the week