Week Two

During the year, we will keep a tally of how many children lose teeth during the month. We were able to end August with our first two tallies of the year! Two of our students lost a tooth! It's fun to see which months had the most missing teeth. Let's see if we'll have more than two in September!

We talked about the various stages of writing. Then we had Writer's Workshop. We spent the first 5 minutes writing with no talking. It was a great way to get our thoughts together, and write and draw what we were thinking about. Then we spent about 15 minutes working with our friends, talking about what we were writing, and illustrating. Then we spent the last 5 minutes sharing. One table got to share their work. After each student shared, the others gave them "hurrays!" (a.k.a. compliments). Our classmates were so kind to each other. The children were already looking forward to next week to continue working on what they were writing.

We also had a lot of fun playing the card game Compare. The children took turns each turning over one card from their deck and comparing them with their partner. The one with the highest number got to keep the cards. They really enjoyed playing this game.

We read “A Porcupine Named Fluffy” by Helen Lester. It was such a cute book about a porcupine who has an unusual name. After reading the book, each child drew a picture of an animal and then came up with a creative name for it. For example, on student said "A turtle named Rush." The children were very creative!  Their work is hanging in our front windows.

We also reread the big book Lunch. This time we learned what an adjective was and we picked out all of the adjectives in the book (red, juicy, tender, green, etc..). Then, I had the children tell me an adjectives to describe the top they were wearing. They really got the hang of it! We also practiced recalling the order of the fruits and vegetables.

We also focused on letters vs words. After re-reading Lunch by Denise Fleming, the students each received a mixed up sentence from the book. They cut up the words, put them back in order, glued them, and then illustrated the sentence.

This week we are focusing on our names. First, each student wrote their name on an index card. Then they put a star sticker over each vowel. We counted how many vowels were in each students' name and then we graphed our names by number of vowels.

We practiced what it should look like and sound like during D.E.A.R. time (Drop Everything and Read). Reading by yourself or with a friend (looking at pictures, thinking about the story, reading words, or listening to someone else read).

In social studies, we created "All About Me" glyph quilt squares. We compared our glyphs and looked for things that were similar and different among our classmates. They are hanging in our front windows.