We started some very important pre-reading activities this week. One activity is a word sort. Students have to sort pictures of words with the same beginning sound. Each day during the week they do the sort a little differently, but by the end of the week they are very good at distinguishing those beginning sounds. Every Friday we still send the word sort home for you to try on the weekend too. Please keep the word sorts at home once they come home on Friday.
We also do some phonemic awareness listening games every day. Students work on rhyming words, counting words in a sentence, beginning, middle and ending sounds, as well as breaking words apart. These all are very important skills to have as they start reading and deciphering new words.
We continued with our printing program this week. Students are learning the difference between turtle letters (letters that stay under the dotted line), worm letters (letters that go below the bottom line) and giraffe letters ( letters that take up the whole line space, top line to bottom line). I have already seen a marked improvement in their daily agenda writing and their special person writing. Also remember that this is a process and students will pick up these skills at different rates. It is more important to me that they are successful writers right now, rather than neat ones!
In Math we continue our numbers to 10 unit. We are counting objects, sorting objects, lining up objects and still working on the many ways we can show a number. This week we really worked on the tens frame and tally marks.
Also in Math, on the 10th day of school we had a special visitor sneak into the classroom and leave some activities to teach us about the power of a ZERO. He can attach to any number and he starts the number sequence over again! Zero the Hero has a very important job, and as we count to the 100th day of school he will visit our classroom every 10 days.
In gym we are doing locomotion stations! Very fun!
Since the Fall Walk was cancelled we were invited to 1A to explore some Fall Centres and we read the book Fletcher and the Falling Leaves. It is about a little Fox who is having a hard time understanding why the leaves are all falling off the trees and he tries his best to keep at least one leaf for this tree. After holding onto the tree's last leaf it of course falls off. After the story we worked on creating our own special fall leaves. Students had to have a lot of patience for this project as they ripped small pieces of construction paper to glue on their special leaf. They turned out so pretty and will be hanging from our roof for a few days. We are also learning the 4 seasons cycle, and about the many other characteristics of fall.
We also learned how to log on and off of the Chromebooks this week. Some Grade 4 students came to help us get the hang of doing it, and on Thursday we logged on by ourselves. Students need to become proficient at logging on so we can use the Chromebooks for a few activities throughout the year. We will continue to practice this skill along with doing some typing practice over the months of September and October.
We continued learning a new letter every day this week through our Animated Literacy Program. Students should now know the letters, D, A, M, T. They can show you the action and the sound that each letter makes.
We were word detectives this week with our silent reading. Students used magnifying glasses when they were reading to start really looking for words that they know. We also learned about one of our reading buddies, Eagle Eye, who helps remind us to look at the pictures when we are reading and trying to learn new words. Pictures can often give us a clue.
I think that's enough for this week!
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