Doreen Cronin Visits!

What an exciting morning we had. We were very lucky to have a visit by Doreen Cronin thanks to "The Flying Pig Bookstore" and Vasanthi Meyette. What a wonderful and entertaining speaker she was. Doreen talked about her life as a writer and the process of creating a book. She shared with us a book that she has written about Moms. Her explanation was very creative. Please ask your child what she had to say about Moms. (Think sleep, hydration, exercise, etc.) The book is called "M.O.M. (Mom Operating Manual) and I plan to pick it up this weekend and share the whole book with the class next week. The children had a great time and at the end she signed the purchased books and those that children brought in from home. It was a fun event!!!

Writing

Boy do your children love to write!!! They are writing fantastic stories and learning about lots of features Authors use in their writing. We have been reading a lot of Mentor texts to learn about features such as lots of details in their writing, italic words, detailed illustrations, more than 1 illustration on a page, bold words, big bold words and lots more. They are incorporating these features into their own writing and then a couple of kids get to share their writing each day. I can't wait to share some of their writing with you during conferences. Below are some students sharing their writing with the class:

Math

For the past 2 weeks we have been very busy in math learning about sea creatures, counting by 10s and 5s, and working on addition and subtraction stories. We made a crab chart which you can see below that shows counting by 10s using the crab legs. We also learned interesting facts about crabs. The biggest surprise was that there are over 4500 different kinds of crabs. We also made a quilt with sea stars and quilt blocks. We learned lots of fun facts about sea stars as well such as they spit up their stomachs and their legs grow back if they lose one. Below are pictures of some of our work:

French Monday

This week on Monday (Oct. 24th) our class had a visit from a 6th grade French class. The sixth graders had written French stories about homes. Each sixth grader was grouped with 2-3 First graders and they read their stories and then had a second copy for our class to color and take home. Unfortunately there weren't enough copies of a book for all of the students but every group worked out on their own as to who would take it home. The children loved hearing the sixth graders read their stories in French. It was a great experience for all of them. I'd like to thank Madeleine for approaching Madame Delaurier and asking her to have her class share their stories with us. Below are some pictures of the Shares:

Friday, October 14th

Hello Everyone,

I'm sorry I missed posting last week. I was not feeling well and just didn't find the time to do it.

This week I was able to finish up most of the assessment and am happy to say that I will be starting Guided Reading Groups next week. Your children are doing a great job of reading from their book boxes for Independent Reading time. They are reading their "Just Right" books and using their reading strategies to figure out unknown words. I am very proud of the work they are doing.

We have also been working on "Buddy/Partner Reading" this week. Each child has a partner that they will be reading with during this time and they either read the same book together or each read their own book. After they finish reading they talk about the book that they read. They can talk about characters in the book, things that were important about the story, their favorite parts, connections they have to the story and other things related to the book. It's great to listen to the discussions that they have with each other. Below are some pictures of students reading together.

Hands On Nature

We had Hands on Nature this week. We learned about Trees this month. Some of the activities that we did were:

-A Puppet Show
-Learned about the exterior parts of the tree (Mrs. Nakhleh was dressed up as a tree)
-Checked out tree cookies (interior parts of tree)
-Built a tree using ourselves as the parts of the tree
-Tree Life Cycle Shuffle to find different stages in nature
Created a big circle which was the size of the largest tree (Sequoia)

Some things the students learned from this lesson was:

"Trees have different kinds of fruits."
"Tree rings show how old the tree is."
"Trees need seeds to grow."
"There's heartwood in trees."
"Roots can split boulders." (This was popular among student's learning.)
"There is different stuff inside trees."
"Trees have different layers of wood."
"Each part of the tree has a job: I'm big and strong (heartwood), water going up, sap going down, we make new wood and bark, and grr... food going down."

I'd like to thank Cecelia, Colleen, Lynn, and Caitlin for coming in and teaching all of the children about trees!

Red Clover

We have a winner.......




Runner up was "Bink & Gollie" by Kate DiCamillo and Alison McGhee