End of Octobrrrrrrr!

Brr! What a cold end to our fun week. It was great to see everyone at conferences! I'm so proud of how the students are working and learning and growing together!

This week, we finished our very first writing pieces, and got to share them with each other and CELEBRATE our amazing work (all to the sound of the classic song, "Celebration")! I included a few examples of the students' work.

We also are really starting to get down the doubles rap--here it is, for your viewing enjoyment! I hope you have a safe and fun weekend, wherever you'll be!

It's a Doubles "Rap"

We're back in the groove after a long weekend! This week, students tackled doubles facts in math, and doubles + 1. They learned a rap to help them cement in their math facts--ask them to rap for you this weekend if you have time! Hopefully, after we really get the moves down, I can get up a video for your viewing enjoyment. Most of the kids really got into it, and it helps with the memorizing. 

In reading, we are plowing ahead with read-to-self time. We have almost reached 10 minutes of totally quiet read-to-self time. The students who have shown me they can keep a self-controlled body and be engaged while reading the entire time will get to choose their spot for read-to-self next week. They are all looking forward to it!

In other news, CLIMB Theater came in and talked about keeping our self-control. They taught the kids a cheer called the "expert cheer", and a special saying to remember our self-control. All the students are now experts in self-control, which they displayed later on Thursday, when the author of the Ivy&Bean series, Annie Barrows, came to visit. We had a lot of fun! 

Here are some highlights of the week; until next time!

Things are FALLing into Place

Happy October!

Autumn is one of my favorite times of the year, and we've been having fun incorporating FALL things into our lessons last week and this week. This week, we learned about warm and cool colors on the color wheel and then spent time tracing leaf outlines and using our fabulous watercoloring skills to fill in the leaf outlines with WARM colors. Here was the outcome:

In math this week, we learned about "put-together" and "take-apart" problems on our "part-part-whole" mats. Students learned a song about how "part" is also known as an "addend", and "whole" is also known as the "sum" in math problems. We started by using our connecting cubes and part-part-whole mats to solve problems, and eventually transitioned to creating math sentences (also known as equations). The students made huge progress this week. If you eat pizza with them at all this weekend, I encourage you to ask them about the pizza problems we did in math this week. They loved it!

Here are a couple of our hard-at-work mathematicians!


MEA and Fall Conferences are approaching. I hope you were able to sign up for conferences and will enjoy the fall break next Thursday and Friday! Until then!