October 10-14

With conferences last week and other personal things in my life I didn't even get around to doing a blog update! Last week Mrs. Becher, my student teacher, was teaching full time so I was actually out of the room quite a bit. This week is her last week and so I'll be taking over everything again by the end of the week. It was nice to get some stuff done last week, but I'm looking forward to teaching the kiddos again! Here's what we're doing this week!

Literacy
We are starting a new theme this week about family. We read a story today about grandmothers and discussed how they can be called different names. We are also really trying to focus on retelling a story by using the story structure of the story window. They're getting pretty good at it!
Our letter friend this week is Tiggie Tiger. We will be focusing a lot on the sound /t/ and comparing to the sounds of s,m, and r.
We have two new sight words this week. They are: my, mom. We will be doing lots of activities working on these words throughout the week.
In writing we are starting to try and add words to our stories. We've talked about how to "turtle talk" or sound out words using the sounds we know from the alphafriends.

Math
Last week we started Unit 2. This unit continues to focus on the numbers 6-10, as you've seen from the homework! It also starts to incorporate the use of money (pennies and nickels so far) and patterns. It also starts the kids thinking about how math is all around us and we can always tell a story and somehow make it into a math story. Try this at home. When your child tells you a story have him/her think about how to use that story to create an addition or subtraction problem! I think they will surprise you! :-)

Intervention Week
Instead of integrated studies, this week we have an intervention week. This allows us to focus on the skills that some kids are still missing and push forward those who already have the skills mastered. We have groups doing different things: letter identification, beginning sounds, rhyming, and sight words. Ask your child whose classroom they were in today at the end of the day and what they worked on!

Book Order
I sent home a book order today in the manila folders. You have until the end of the month to return it, or go online and order. I will send a reminder at the end of the month.

Literacy Homework
Just a reminder that the literacy homework sheets (the apple sheet) will be due next Wednesday. Please be getting those finished up so we can celebrate all the great work the kids have done!

As always, please let me know if you have any questions!