This week....

READING

This week in my reading group, our phonics focus has been on the short e sound.  We have been doing different activities daily to build on our understanding and push us a little further.  Students created words on their own, students listened and stood if they heard a short e word, and students have had practiced writing short e words.  


For our comprehension skill, we have been working more with determining importance and synthesizing.  Synthesizing is VERY hard for the students.  Today we did an activity where the students had to give me clues about an object they were thinking of without telling the class the object.  We discussed how each one of the clues (or parts) fit together to help us understand the object (whole).  It's like putting a puzzle together.  There are lots of little parts that we can put together, to help us understand the whole better!  They really enjoyed this activity.  Tyler gave us these clues.  Let's see if you can figure it out :)


-long neck
-really tall
-yellow spotted body
-eats leaves
*WHAT AM I????  


I have been very pleased with my reading group.  Everyone has made a great transition and have really dove head first into Daily 5!  For those of you who don't know what Daily 5 is, it is a structure where students learn certain tasks/behaviors to do in the classroom.  We call them the daily 5.  The tasks are 1.  Read to Self  2.  Read to Someone  3.  Listen to Reading  4.  Work on words  5.  Work on writing.  I will take pictures of our posters soon so you can all be aware of the rules!  Some students have been lucky enough to make it onto our posters.  I post pictures of students who were caught doing the right thing during their "choice".  The students LOVE this.   Everyone seems to REALLY be enjoying this.  They especially love word work :)  The students all Read to Self for their first choice.  While they are reading to self, I am doing individual conferences with students where I listen to them read, and then we set a goal for them to work on.  When I schedule my next appointment with them, they show me their progress with their goal.  We are still getting used to the conferences, but once we have them in a routine,  they will go really fast!!  During all of the choices I am working either with students one on one or in a small skill focus group.  


We are slowly getting into writing since the switch.  The first thing we have started to focus on is creating ideas for our writing!  More to come on this later :)

word work

word work

listen to reading

short e game

listen to reading

read to self

read to someone

work on writing

MATH

In math, we finished our shapes unit and everyone did VERY well on the test.  Several students missed picking 2 shapes that could fit together to make a square.  We reviewed this and I also sent it on the review home.  Please do not worry if your child missed this!  It is OK .


We started a new unit this week where we are working on ordinal and position numbers.  The students have enjoyed doing activities where I call a student up and ask them to get in order based on my direction.  Today, we had the entire class up in some kind of order.  I would say things like, "Tyler, I want you to get in line and show me that you are 5th from the right."  The students all had a blast with this.  We also did things like under, on top of, far, close, next to, behind, in between, etc.  The students seemed to do this well during class, but some struggled with putting it on paper.  We will continue to work on this throughout the unit.  

SCIENCE

We are on to discussing camouflage, producers and consumers, and food chains this week.  On Friday (if all goes as planned) the students will have the opportunity to dissect owl pellets.  I have not discussed this with them yet, but plan to tell them tomorrow after we do producer and consumer.  THEY WILL BE SO EXCITED!  It's a little gross for me, but totally worth it to see them excited to do/try something new.  I will make sure to take plenty of pictures to share!

BOX TOP PARTY

Today was our BOX TOP party!  I was SO thankful that this was at the END of the day.  The students were BEYOND wound up after this.  They each got their own serving of yogurt and got to add as many toppings as they wanted.  It was hilarious!!  I am so proud of them for bringing in all their box tops and coming SO close to being the winner.  (I think they felt like winners today no matter what the outcome really was!)  It was very cute.
Please continue to send in your box tops.  I think every month or so there is a competition.  I don't think we are in the running this month, but hopefully next month we can all get together again and WIN AGAIN!!!!

Hope everyone has a great night!
Please let me know if you need anything :)

Ms. Jervis