Happy November!

Hope everyone had a safe Halloween!

A note about water bottles: 

We had more than one spill yesterday, as some of our bottles are "remove or screw off caps" to drink, and we would benefit from "NON-SPILL" bottles, that have flip tops with straws or spouts to drink from, so that tops are not being removed and bottles being spilled.  

Last Day of October Work:

Students brought some pictures and writing home in their folders, as well as their little books to read at home.  We read the stories, "A Dark, Dark Night" and "It Didn't Frighten Me".  These are both repetitive and predictable texts for children, meant to support their independent reading.  From this we did our own writing or followed a prompt based on the readings. 

As always with our writing, we share in the same format for "read to a partner" at school, so that students are always developing awareness of their own ideas vs print copied from a scribe, and they are developing awareness of the message contained in their own writing through the expectation to be able to read what you wrote! (Even if that means using your memory, looking for sounds you know and using the picture to help you remember what the words say) This is a normal beginning stage of writing - students do struggle to read their own writing and we support them through this learning just as we would support them for any reading task. We took pictures of all our work, so that we could send those home right away for you to share!

Students were very engaged for this literacy work and excited to bring their writing and pictures home.  For emergent to beginner writers we accept their approximations of words, word order, and what we see as errors, as this is their "WORK" to use letters and sounds, decoding words they think of and encoding to attach the letter, as well as the symbol formation and motor skills to get their ideas down on paper.  It is a long process to go through all that work AND try to keep a word order that makes sense. 

At school we also finished up our October calendars in our calendar books, where we practice number formation and patterning.  We track the weather and practice counting and comparing amounts to see "how many more", or "how many less" as well as how many! 

We also brought a couple little poems home.  These are the style of chants and poems we use in the classroom to promote all the baseline skills that support both reading and writing.  We use these to track print left to right, finger match to words we know, reread for meaning and understanding and practice rhyming.  The sound chant is helpful for "beginning sounds" focus for those who need a little support, review and practice linking the beginning sound (isolating only the first letter in a word) to a whole word, and then coming back to think of other words that start with this same sound.  For some students, this is still challenging as they are learning about the conventions of spacing within words and spacing between words in a sentence. 

We had a very busy day and we are looking forward to our FELTING in class next Thursday!