Week Ending 9/27

Happy Friday!  It was good to see many of you at our Open House morning yesterday!  I thank you for being flexible and trying something new with us this year.  The students were very excited to see all of you and show off where they spend their days.  I look forward to a great year with all of them and as we work hard, be kind, push through challenges, and laugh along the way, I know they are going to grow so much.

Important information:

• Monday there is no school.
• Wednesday, October 9th, and Monday, October 14, there is also no school.  
• Please help us remind your children that Monday is library day so if they want to take out new books, they should be bringing the other books back.  

3, 2, 1 things you should know about our week...

3 read aloud we read were The Mightiest, Sheila Rae the Brave, and Arthur's Tooth.  We used to The Mightiest to focus on how we self monitor while reading.  As I read aloud, students listened to my think aloud on how to self monitor.  While reading we should be thinking about our pace, stopping at punctuation, sounding out words, rereading when confused, as well as working on strategies for understanding such as making connections and predictions.  They loved telling me when I was doing something I should be paying attention to and then they practiced this with their own books before sharing with their partner what they noticed.  We used the other two read aloud books to focus on making connections to the book.  For example, we focused on how Sheila Rae was brave and a time they were brave.  We also used these read aloud to help set us up for using our binders during reading workshop.  Many times after a read aloud and discussion students will write a response to that book or their own in their binder focusing on the skill we worked on.  It helps them apply the work right then and I can check for understanding.
**Ask your child which book they enjoyed reading this week.  

2 read workshop activities we worked on were choosing our small moment story topic and stretching our ideas.  We started by looking at all our brainstorming and deciding if the story idea was a big idea or a small idea.  If it was a big idea, we needed to do some more work to choose one small idea to write about.  If it was a small idea, we began telling our story to a partner over our fingers focusing on beginning, middle, and end.  Some of us even started our writing!
**Ask your child their topic for the small moment story they started during writing workshop.

1 fun activity we started this week was Team Time!  Friday afternoons we take about 15 minutes to work together as a team to accomplish a task.  It could be small groups or the class together but it's a time to practice listening skills, patience, being open to other ideas, and following directions.  Today we played Don't Wake the Dragon and they did a great job!