Our First Full Week, Whew!

Thank you to all the families who carved time out of their schedule to meet with Ms. Miller and me for Ready Set Goal conferences.  We have enjoyed meeting with all of you and setting meaningful learning goals for your child.  We hope to finish up conferences by next week and if we do not have a time scheduled expect a call next week to set up a meeting.

We have been busy during reading workshop reading, setting guidelines, reading with teachers and exploring our library.  Students took book bins, explored them, wrote about them and then shared their learning with a partner.  We plan on starting our actual reading groups in the next few weeks.

These are some charts we created during our workshop.We discussed, practiced and share some of the thinking we do when we read.

We used our new Reading Logs today!  Students will be recording their good thinking this these logs along with genre and strategy learning and recording powerful words and phrases they encounter in their reading.

Today students recorded their thinking with a book, My Secret Bully, that Ms. Mack read as a read-a-loud.  They made connections during the reading and then wrote about their thinking after reading and discussing the book.

The kids in the Lily Pad continue to work hard on generating "seed stories" (not giant all-about watermelon topics) during our writer's workshop.  Students are working on generating stories about people, place and things/objects that are meaningful to us thinking of small moments in time that they associate with the subject and writing focused, "zoomed in" stories.

Thursday, students learned about their roles and the teacher's role in writing conferences.  We practiced conference and are encouraging students to use language that writer's use.  Some of the charts above are examples of language they can use during our conferences. Writing partners continue to share their writing with each other and partners support each other through the writing process.

This week we have conducted a Time Telling Workshop.  Students are working at their just right level with telling time.  Some students are becoming more familiar with the hour and minute hands and are working on basic time telling skills, other students are mastering their time telling skills (telling time to the nearest minute and solidifying their understanding of time phrases like "a quarter to" and "half past"), other students are working on number stories that require solving how much time has passed (elapsed time.)  We will conclude our workshop this week but please continue to work with your child on telling time, especially if this is a skill they still need to master.

These students worked on estimating how many times they could complete a certain task in 1-minute and then completing that task, comparing their actual results with their estimate.

We finally have our door display, Rights and Responsibilities document and Classroom Jobs chart ready and they look fabulous!

A very popular Friday event is the school store.  Items range in price from 5 cents to $1.00.  Children are encourage to bring no more than a few dollars each time. 

Upcoming Events:

• Monday, 9/19 - International Talk Like a Pirate Day - embrace your inner pirate!
• Friday, September 23 - Picture Day
• Friday, September 30 - 3rd Grade Pancake Breakfast (held in classrooms)

Don't forget to return library books and all homework is due on Fridays.  Make sure you are reading and recording your minutes on your reading calendar!