Happy Fall!

This week in math, we finished our number review.  You may have heard your child singing our "Number Song" at home as he/she forms her numbers.  If not, you may want to ask them to sing it to you.  It's a great, fun song to help students remember the correct way to write numbers.  I am so impressed by the beautiful handwriting I've seen this week.  We have also been practicing making groups of different numbers and finding the correct number of a group of objects.  Here are some students writing numbers on their white boards as we listen to the song and see the numbers being written as a projected image:

In language arts, we focused on the letter Mm.  We learned what sound it made, how to write it correctly, and found many things that begin with the letter M.  We also learned our first sight words of the year: a, the, me.  We got to add them to our word wall and practice spelling and recognizing them.  We also read lots of "circle books" this week.  These are stories by Laura Numeroff such as "If you Give a Mouse a Cookie."  We learned that these are stories that begin in a place and come back around to the same place.  (The beginning and end are the same).  We also learned a really "fancy" word: Schema, and what this has to do with reading.  See if your child can explain it to you! :)  Then, we "activated" our schema while we read and practiced making text to self connections.  In other words, we shared which parts of books reminded us about something in our own life.  Whew!  What a busy week! :)

Here are the students with their M is for Moose hats on:

In unit study, we finished our unit on the 5 senses.  As a culminating event that used both our knowledge of the 5 senses as well as many fine motor and literacy skills, the students made "self-portraits" using construction paper and then labeled their self-portrait with the 5 senses.  They did such a fantastic job.  I was extremely impressed!

Looking forward to next week....

In Language Arts we will be reading books about Miss Bindergarten and other alphabet books.  We will continue using our schema to help us make connections to the books we read.   We will be learning the three new sight words: be, black, by.  We will continue writing in our journals.  Finally, we will begin writing lists. 

In math, we will be learning about shapes and their similar and different characteristics (sides, corners, etc.).  We will also be tracing shapes and exploring them on our own in our math stations. 

In unit study, we will begin an investigative unit about Fall.  We will learn about the season of Fall, and its characteristics.  We will also learn a lot about leaves and pumpkins and exploring these fall items. 

Thank you for your continued support!