Halloween in being celebrated in school this Friday, October 30th. The students must come to school dressed in their regular clothes in the morning. If your child is staying at school for lunch and would like to wear his/her costume for the Halloween Parade in the afternoon, he/she may change into his/her costume right after recess. For those of you who would like to watch, the school Halloween Parade is on the CHS field at 1:30.
We had a visit from Officer Paul last week! He spoke to the students about Halloween safety and we took pictures with a police car. We also went to the Discovery Lab to learn a little bit more about insects' body parts.
Here's what we were working on in the classroom :
Reading : We finished up learning about ways to get our minds ready to read (see last week's post for more information about this) by learning about going on a book walk. This helps familiarize you with the layout of the book and the basic story line by looking at the pictures.
Then, we dove into learning about print strategies. Print strategies are strategies that people use to help decode tricky words. In the classroom, we attach a fun animal to each strategy to help the students remember them. So far, we've learned about 'Eagle Eye.' This strategy is about using the pictures in the book to help you figure out tricky words.
Writing : We used our writing time this week to learn all about how we are going to learn about sight words (also known as word wall words) in 1-Bu, and to go over each night's homework. Hopefully your child was prepared for the homework each night and already knew what to do. Please let me know if you have any questions about the word wall homework.
Math : We spent a lot of time working with number stories last week. We started off by learning about why it's important to label the units in a number story (i.e. what the numbers represent). Then, we learned about a 'start, change, end' diagram to use to help organize the important numbers in a number story.
Phonics : We focused on the short i all week. By now, I expect that the students are spelling basic short a and short i words with ease.
Social Studies : Continuing on in our unit about communities, we spoke about community helpers and where they worked in the community. We also spoke about equality and fairness, and how equality doesn't necessarily mean that something is fair.
Here are some pictures of 1-Bu last week: