Room 10 is definitely in full swing, and Halloween is quickly becoming the topic of choice during free time! More information will be coming soon about Halloween festivities, but for now know that a Halloween parade has been planned for 9:30 AM on Friday, October 30, and our classroom party will take place at 1:30 PM that same afternoon.
A few highlights of what we've been working on as of late...
- The children are beginning to meet with me at the reading table during our "literacy center" block. This is a time when they read “just right” books with a small group of children who are at a similar reading level. It is a great way to differentiate and provide instruction based on the varied needs of the children in my room. Among the MANY reading / phonics skills and strategies the children are learning about, one is reading fluency. This is when a reader reads smoothly and with an even tone of voice. The children are working to read like a “river” (with flow and fluency) and not like a “robot” (word by word). This takes time and practice for some children, so don’t be worried if your child isn’t doing it right away. Like many of the skills we’re learning this year, this part of reading doesn’t happen overnight.
- Another important focus area will be teaching the children how to retell a story in their own words after they’ve read it. This skill also will take LOTS of practice. Over the next few months we will work on retelling skills: recalling and orally retelling the characters, setting and the main events of a given story or text.
- During our daily "word study" time, the children are learning a wide range of phonics skills. We have been reviewing / practicing all consonant and short vowel sounds (as in the words had, dig, got, bed, and hug). We are building words with magnetic tiles, writing sentences with an eye on uppercase letters at the beginning and punctuation at the end. We are learning about "trick words", also known as "sight words" (or high frequency words). These are words the children will encounter often as they read/spell. While they are learning how to segment/blend words that are phonetically regular by using a "finger tapping" strategy, they are also learning that "trick words" often don't look the way they sound so therefore they can not be sounded out. They must be recalled and mastered by sight. All of these skills will be practiced and reinforced many times throughout the year.
- Our home reading program will start very soon. Look for more information about BOOKTIME and the best ways you can support your first grade reader at home when he/she brings a book envelope home with "just right" books.
- I hope you and our child have enjoyed the first couple of weeks of Poem Notebooks. Please try to send your child's notebook back to school on Thursdays as we use them often. If you need to keep the notebook another night or two, just let me know. The number of poems will continue to increase as the year moves along. Some children like to read all of the poems each week. Others prefer to pick and choose some of their favorites. Either way, try to read for at least 10 minutes (or more) on Poem Notebook nights.
- Our writer’s workshop block is a favorite time in our day. The children are learning that writers think first, then picture a story in their mind, and after that put their ideas into words one part at a time. Learning how to stretch an idea across several pages and include key details takes lots of practice. Of course, the children are also working hard on spelling, spacing, punctuation and organization. This is a tall task indeed, but one that they are tackling with enthusiasm and persistence.
- During our math block, the children have been working hard to solve addition / subtraction problems presented via a range of math story "types". The children are learning how to use Part/Part/Whole visual tools to help them solve given problems. Problems are presented in ways that ask children to determine what information is already known, and what they need to find out. My goal is to create a separate math page on this blog so I can more specifically communicate what we are working on. More on that soon!
- You may have found that some of the math pages that come home are not fully complete and may have unfinished problems. Our new math program offers a bounty of math practice pages, and I pick / choose which ones I feel will best meet the expectations in a given lesson. I want to leave time for children to practice the math concepts with age-appropriate, hands-on games, rather than always tackling the task in a worksheet. I'm working to strike a balance between the two. Please feel free to finish any unfinished math problems at home with your child.
Please always let me know if you have any questions about anything happening here in Room 10. It has been a great start to the year and there's lots more learning, news and fun to come!