We Survived!

This blog post will be short and sweet because we have something to celebrate....we survived our first play together! I think it went great! Everyone remembered their lines and songs. There were some "sillies" for sure. :) But we had fun, and gained a great experience!

Literacy:

This week we had a lot of review of the recent reading strategies we have been learning. We practiced tracking, return sweep and taking a picture walk. We also added another blend to our 'reading bank'. Charlie was our marvelous me yesterday and we noticed a new blend in his name. The Ch blend is in Charlie's name! Ch makes the same sound as a "choo choo train". So as we read this week we were looking for the ch blend and the th blend (that we learned last week). We also discovered something neat while reading the months of the year during calendar time. We learned that several months end in -er. So we also looked for other words that ended in -er. We were searching all around the room for ch and th blends and words that ended in er! This is another neat activity you can do at home. While you are reading, have your child look for words that contain these blends and have an -er ending. They get so excited! Our word sorts next week will definitely contain some of these blends because they love them so much.  Tomorrow we will be making letters and words out of play dough! This is a great opportunity to talk about where letters start (at the top). We will also talk about the different characteristics that letters have such as: big lines, short lines, half circles, full circles etc. I will call out a sound or word and the kids will build it out of play dough. Another great hands on activity that is easy to do at home!

Writer's workshop was really neat this week. We focussed on stories containing beginnings, middles and ends. We broke apart the Three Little Pigs story into beginning, middle and end. We also discussed why it is so important to have a beginning, middle and end when we write. We then took our own books and made sure to include a beginning, middle and end to our story this week. I kept all of these books to share at conferences! We also remembered to include a title and author (both are concepts we have learned previously).

Math:

We have been playing all of our review games this week and wrapping up our unit on counting and sorting as we move onto patterns next. We have really been enjoying all of our counting games and plan to still play these frequently. The kids were allowed to choose their math games this week. They chose from: Chickity Chop, Let's Go Fishing, Roll a Tower and Say it Fast. We also learned about graphing this week. Each child was given a bag of bridges, goats and tolls to sort and then graph. They had to count how many they had of each and then graph it. This was still hard, as graphing is still somewhat new....but very cool!

We finished our unit on fairytales this week by completing a hero vs. villain sort. This was displayed right outside of our classroom. We have been studying the different elements of a fairytale and this was a great way to show off some of that new knowledge! Today we had another fairytale sort. There were pictures of all of the fairytales mixed up on a sheet of paper. They had to cut out each picture and sort them according to the right fairytale and glue them in the correct column. It was hard work!

We will not be going to the park next week as our park day is a half day (the 24th) and we are already super crunched for time!

Don't forget that the Dad Pumpkin Carving is coming up (October 29th at 12:00) as well as conferences (24th and 25th of October)!

We will be needing:
1. 2 small bags of plastic spiders (not the spider rings just the small plastic spiders) to go in our sensory table
2. toilet paper rolls (no limit on these)
3. 10 one pund bags of rice (for our sensory table)
4. 2 pack of clothes pins (dollar store)

**Remember next week we have a half day on October 24th and no school on October 25th or October 28th.


Hugs,
Mrs. Schultz