Please remember that this week is a short week. The students only have school on Monday and Wednesday.
Here's what we were working on in the classroom last week:
Reading : We continued learning about decoding strategies last week. (Take a look at last week's post for more information on decoding strategies.) We learned about getting our mouth ready to read a tricky word by saying the first sound and we learned about sounding out a word, sound-by-sound.
In the classroom, we have tied these strategies to animals with silly names to help the students remember the strategies. Ask your child about Spoon the Raccoon Detective, Hugo the Huge Mouth Hippo, and Slither the Sound It Out Snake.
Writing : The students have been doing a great job with our Small Moments writing unit. Last week, we went into a little more depth about how to choose good small moment story topics to write about and how to stretch those small moments across pages. We also have starting talking about the writing process. First, you think of an idea. Then, you tell the story across your fingers. After that, you get paper. Next, you sketch the pictures. We'll talk about the rest of the writing process next week. :)
Phonics : We learned another short vowel sound last week - the short i. By now, the students should be able to successfully write three letter words with a short a or a short i in the middle. (We call these CVC words, because the first letter is a consonant, the middle letter is a vowel, and the last letter is a consonant.)
Math : Last week we started learning about money! So far, we've learned about the penny and the nickel. We've identified and explored the coins, counted the coins, exchanged the coins, and learned about how to write in dollars and cents notation. Practice this at home by giving your child a combination of pennies and nickels and having him/her count them.
Social Studies : Last week, we continued learning about map skills. We spoke about different kinds of maps and how the world is shown on maps.
Here are pictures of 1-Bu on Halloween: