Fun Loving February!

Our first full week of February has been full of learning and fun!  We had a great visit from one of my favorites Johnny the K.  Johnny entertains with his silly hats and songs that have a great message.  Our class sang along and while wearing their own silly hats.

Fundations

In our Fundations lessons we have been working on glued sounds.  These are sounds which letters have their own sounds but they are difficult to separate.  Here are the glued sounds the students have been working on: ang, ing, ong, ung, ank, ink, onk, unk.    We are now moving on to blends.  This is where two consonants together each make a sounds as in the word s-t-o-p the s and the t each make a sound.  We will also introduce the sounds for r-controlled vowels.  These are sounds ar as in car as well as or, er, ir,and ur.

Math

We are finishing up our unit where we take surveys and use the information to make graphs to share the information with others.  We learned that we can use these surveys and graphs to compare the data and make comparisons about what the people taking the survey thought.   We even surveyed our class on who thought the groundhog would see his shadow and who thought he would not.  We graphed our information and talked about what our data showed about our class.  We will be moving on to the next unit where students will be working on counting by 10's and ones up to 120.  We will be looking for patterns when we count on our 100's chart.  We will learn that these patterns are better and faster ways to solve problems.  While working on these math concepts we are continuing to practice solving addition/subtraction via word problems, games and rote practice.


Writers Workshop

We continue to write our non fiction books.  Our class has so many things that they are experts on and can teach others about.  We have books about soccer, gymnastics, falcons, art, cooking and so many more great topics!  We have been setting goals for ourselves on things we can do better in our writing and working with partners who help us to edit our work.   We got to have a celebration where we read our friends stories and gave them compliments on their writing.  We will be moving on to writing non fiction chapter books very soon!

Here we are working with our partners to edit our work:

And now we are going to celebrate and share our stories with the class.  

Daily 5

In our Daily 5 center jobs we are continuing to work on our reading and writing skills.  We are practicing our sight words by reading and spelling them.  We are listening and responding to books and practicing our fluency with our poem notebooks and read to someone.  In our guided reading groups we continue to develop a broad use of our reading strategies.  When we tackle a new book we respond to texts and demonstrate our comprehension,  we build our fluency and expand our vocabulary.  We have added to our CAFE strategies to use effective strategies for good comprehension, fluency, accuracy and expanding our vocabulary.