We launched head first into learning today. Now that we've got the rules and procedures established and have gotten to know each other a bit we are ready to get down to the nitty gritty. We started out our day with our very first "smartwork." Smartwork is our daily warm up. It starts out with a fix it sentence and then has a variety of math and language problems for the children to do. The children work independently on this for the first few minutes of the day while we wait for daily announcements and take care of lunch and attendance count. We then go through the material together on the smartboard and the children make corrections to their own work. This sheet goes home daily in the frog binder. It will allow you to see what learning targets we are working on in class.
After smartwork we started off with our first math lesson of the year. We worked with number sequence, number patterns, and skip counting. We played Froggy Number Squeeze on the smartboard after finishing our math journal assignment.
Writer's workshop is quickly becoming one of our favorite times of the day. Today we reviewed our lesson from last week about how everyone has a story to tell. Today we took it a little further and we started a list of things that writers can write about. The kids learned some more workshop procedures and then had time to write stories in their writing notebook. We ended our workshop with an author's share using the ipevo (A thank you to the pto for providing ipevo document cameras to all the teachers at Robinwood.). The kids LOVED sharing their writing! We practiced giving positive feedback to writers as well as suggestions for adding to their piece.
Reader's workshop follows our lunch and recess each day. Today we read McDuff Moves In. We practiced turn and talk with our reading partners and had a great discussion about how we must take time to learn new rules and procedures when ever we move into a new situation, just as McDuff did. We continued working on building our reading stamina and reached the 12 minute mark. We are excited to see our stamina graph growing and can't wait to see it reach the top (22 minutes).
During spelling today we reviewed how we can make new words by adding or removing letters. We did a smartboard activity using virtual "refrigerator magnets" and we had a blast! We also learned about contractions. We will be working with contractions a lot more this week.
After specials we spent some time putting together our frog binders and getting to know all the components inside. We learned how to fill out our daily reflection. The children will be reflecting on their behavior at the end of each day and scoring themselves on the Cool in the Pool reflection sheet in their binder. They will be using a wet erase marker, which they will keep in their zippered pouch in their binder. You should use this same marker to initial their behavior log each day. Be sure to take time to go over your child's frog binder this week. It is a vital part of our home/school connection. The newsletter section in the back has information about school pictures (this Thursday). One child left their papers on the floor. If you do not have the information please let me know and I will direct the papers to the correct binder.
I would like to request your help in keeping our classroom dry. We continue to have many water spills from water bottles that are not spill proof. Please only send water bottles that can be tipped over with out spilling. Water bottles that can spill seem to spill often. Also, please only send water. Juice is not allowed in the classroom except for special classroom activities. Thank you so much for your help in this area.
We had a really great day today! The kids are really starting to settle into our routines and we are having a lot of fun learning together.
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