Ask Me About Friday, October 19, 2018

We had a great day!  In reading, we learned more about information texts.  We know we can learn from studying the photographs, maps, charts, and diagrams that are often in information texts.  We used the table of contents to help find the section about wind in a longer book we wanted to read.  Ask me to tell you what contents means. 
We took a brainbreak and used streamers to move to music.  We practiced skipping, sliding, and moving the streamers up high, low and on the side of our bodies.  We moved fast and slow to the music.    

In writing, we talked about what we can do when we think we're finished.  We have a workshop format, so during this time, we are working on writing pieces the entire time.  Most of our illustrating is done just with pencil, and we only fancy up our writing when we are taking it through the entire writing process.  This makes it possible for the students to spend more time on the text, and to add more details with their pencil to their illustrations that might not be possible with crayons.  Today I added a new tool; we now use pencils with pencil toppers instead of erasers.  We had some children who took a lot of time erasing over and over and not getting as much writing done.  Children were very concerned about their piece being perfect.  The pencil topper is a reminder to go back and read what has been written to check to see if words have been left out and that it sounds right.  It also encourages those very beginning writers to make their text make sense by writing the sounds they hear in the words so their text can be read by others.  They did a great job today with writing the whole time.  No one reported they were done writing to me today, and the Writing Station was the hot station today during Literacy Stations!  

In math, we counted larger quantities today as we played a game with links.  We had long chains of links that needed to be taken apart.  The children sat in a small group and passed the chain around with each child removing one chain.  They hadn't used the chains before, so this was tricky at first!  They had five minutes to take apart as many links as they could, then count them.  This gave their little fingers a good work-out!  There were still links to take apart, so they all helped to take apart thee links and count.  

Enjoy the weekend!  Hopefully it will be as beautiful as today was!
​Miss Wolfe