Celebrating Fluency with Readers Theater!

Dear families,
We have been working on our love for reading and fluency in reading this year...We are celebrating our fluency by reading Readers Theaters of familiar stories. This Readers Theater is the main summary from our story of the week last week, Space Pup. Enjoy these strong readers acting out Space Pup! All readers will get a chance to do Readers Theater throughout the year!

Addition and Subtraction Show Me Lessons

Sight Words, Math Strategies and Spooky Skeleton Hiccups!

The past few weeks have been a lot of independent practice and hopefully application of sight words we have learned! As we learn about patience, working together, sharing and kindness we can also incorporate fun! We have been playing different Sight Word "games" to help with  your child's fluency in writing and spelling Sight Words. These games help with muscle memory of letter formation and spelling of words. We will add and learn different games throughout the year!

Ian and Joe are practicing their fluency in writing and spelling our Safari Sight Words!

Lindsey and Lexi make a great team!

In Math, we have learned strategies for counting on or counting all in addition. Allison is modeling counting all, by drawing all the cirlces from the first partner, then all the circles from the second partner to find the total. We are learning that by trusting the greater number first and counting on with cirlces with the smaller partner saves time and helps our fluency in addition. We are trying to move away from using fingers as that can cause silly mistakes and is not a great way for children to recognize partners and totals in addition and subtraction. Until your child can solve addition and subtraction with automaticity, encourage them to try the counting all or counting on strategy, depending what they are more comfortable with right now.
We've also been learning about vocabulary words for addition. We've learned that all these words mean the same thing as add: sum, total, altogether, increase, combined, plus, both and in all.
We will learn subtraction vocabulary in the coming weeks.
Our next unit in math is based on story problems and solving for missing partner or total based on the information provided. I will be posting some examples throughout the chapter. I will also post some examples of counting on for you to review with your firstie!

Allison modeling and explaining how to solve math equations by showing her work with counting on with circles.

Skeleton Hiccups - pattern story!

Art Project/Writing Response Sample

We read a story called Skeleton Hiccups and recognized the author's purpose was to entertain us and the genre was fiction and fantasty writing. We then created our own skeleton's and answered the prompt: "I would get rid of a skeleton's hiccups by..." It was a lot of fun and great practice for conventions of writing!

Halloween Integrated Learning!

Working on Fluency with the 5 Little Pumpkins poem!

Dear families,

 Please enjoy a few photos from our learning and fun at our Halloween Party last week! A HUGE thank you to all the parents who volunteered their time and who donated items for our classroom! We had a fantastic day!!

Rey, Roman and Mrs. Williams are working on counting and adding coins as they earn enough money to buy parts of their Jack-O-Lanterns!

Mmmmm! Spooky Cookies and Cupcakes!

Fluency in Reading

Dear families,
As STRONG and GROWING readers, we are always working on our FACE of a growing reader. This week while continuing to work on decoding strategies to read words Accurately (A in FACE), we are learning about reading Fluently (F in FACE). Fluent readers read the words smoothly, like when we're talking and read with expression. We practice and model fluent reading by keeping our fingers under each word, checking for punctuation (stopping for a breath at a period, asking like a question with a question mark and reading excitedly for an exclamation point), going back to re-read if we didn't read very smoothly and reading Good Fit books. We practice changing our voices when we notice talking marks and reading like we think the author would want us to read.  This is a great strategy for you to practice when you read with your child at home, to grow their fluency.

Here Joe and Blake are reading their "Orange Pumpkin, Orange Pumpkin" book practicing their fluency.

Word Endings Day 2

To continue our learning about word endings, today we learned that when something happens in the past, we add -ed to the end. So we met granny and gramps -ed. After adding -ed to our words on our word endings chart, we created our own granny and gramps -ed to take home and use as a poster to remind ourselves of word endings. We are also learning that -ed can say "ed," "d," or "t," depending on the word.

Tomorrow we will do a word hunt around the room for words with these endings and we will add a few games to our word work choice during Daily 3 by the end of this week or next week.

Learning Word Endings

 This week we are learning about -ing and -ed word endings.

We are learning that when you add -ing to the end of the word, it is happening now. Tomorrow we will learn that when you add -Ed to the end of the word, it happened in the past...Of course there are exceptions to these rules but we don't go there :) I just explain that we will learn all different types of rules and exceptions in our language throughout our learning years.
We first generated a list of verbs. We then had somebody model it happening now. Next, we said the sentence, such as, "Hannah is dancing." Then, we added the new -ing word to the next column in our chart.





Finally, we had to meet the -ing kids. These kids are happening now!

The children then were able to create their own -ing kids they could hang up as a poster at home to remind them that -ing means "it is happening now!"

Stay tuned for more on our word study this week!

Pete The Cat

I love my brown shoes...I love my brown shoes...I love my blue shoes...I love my blue shoes...

If you are wondering what in the world I am typing about, you must read the story "Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes." and if you love it you can check out, "Pete the Cat: I love my School Shoes."

These are fictional pattern stories that come complete with accompanying rocking music that teach children rhyme and patterning. We read, sang and elaborated on Pete the Cat this week and it culminated in an art project that turned out quite adorable! We practiced our fine motor skills by cutting and folding as well as our listening and organizational skills by following 2 and 3 step directions to create our Pete the Cats. When we finished our project, we put together a class graph analyzing our shoe color data. We practiced responding to questions such as, "How many MORE blue shoes than red shoes" and then would analyze, "How many FEWER red shoes than blue shoes" practicing our math vocabulary and comparing and contrasting information no a bar graph. We then sang the song again :)
Enjoy a few photos as you kick off your weekend!
Hopefully see you at the walkathon and I have heard it will be chilly...perfect for the dunk tank :)