October 9-13

For a short week we were very busy here in 1P! We did a lot of informal assessments with week on their number sense as of right now, their letter recognition, sound recognition, and they did a Schonell spelling test. These tests really helped the students remember what 'Volume 0" is in our classroom as well as the importance of not yelling out the answers during 'tests.' We will continue looking at their current phonemic awareness next week with a few other assessments you will have a chance to see at Parent Teacher Conferences. We finished our week with a lovely scarecrow craft this afternoon. 

Odds and Ends

-If you have not done so please sign up using the link below

- Our school has popcorn Wednesdays! On Wednesdays please if you wish you can send your child with 50 cents to give to me first thing in the morning, and then they will get a bag of popcorn at snack recess. It is a fairly large bag of popcorn most of the students couldn't even finish one. 

-On Wednesday you do not have to send your child with a lunch, one of the parents is bringing in a pizza party to celebrate one of our kiddo's birthday!

- I will be away on Monday along with the other grade one teacher to go learn some things!

Home Reading

Thank you for committing your time to home reading! They are so exciting every morning to come in and read to me. A great strategy some parents have been doing especially with the level AA books is covering the pictures and making the child look at the words. A great progression would be to cover the pictures and look at the words, see if there are any words they recognize or can sounds out, then look at just the pictures and what they see. Then go on to looking at them together. Remember that it is hard for those little ones to sit for that long after a long day of work, maybe read a page then have them get up and do five jumping jacks. Make it fun for them then you will not be wanting to pull your hair out as well!

Language

As said above the kiddos did a few informal assessments this week. I assessed their individual letter recognition and sound recognition. We continue to look at practicing our phonemic awareness and practicing printing 'perfect lowercase letters' many of them still have a hard time with this concept especially for the 'loopy letters' such as S, J, G, and F. We also did an amazing job working through the first two centers of Daily 5. The children are really starting to get the hang of what the expectation is during Read to Self and Work on Writing. They loved using the whiteboards during work on writing to practice printing their number words. 

Math

The math assessment package I put together took us a lot longer to get through than I had anticipated. We were looking at putting numbers into a ten frame, how many a number is, recognizing the number word, and numbers that come before, after and between in the numbers 1-20. We worked more with partner work and flashcards looking at grouping the correct numeral, pictorial and written card. We have introduced counting by 2s and man is it tricky for us! We will be continuing on with this next week. 

Science

We continue to talk about Fall this week. We did some writing about "My favorite things about Fall." and built them into acorns! They are both adorable yet slightly creepy looking.