Ask Me About Wednesday, October 17, 2018

We have had a busy week so far.  Let me catch you up on the highlights
Mrs. Kanter visited us on Monday and talked about DeBug.  This is a set of strategies children can use if someone is bugging them.  We have talked about the difference between someone annoying you and someone physically hurting you.  The children have been told multiple times now if someone hurts you to tell a grown-up immediately.  But if someone is annoying you, that is bugging you, and there are some ways you can take care of the problem on your own.  Here is a list of the steps in DeBug.

This is a lot for kids to learn, so this is something we will continue to talk about in the classroom.  The goal is to empower children to solve kid-size problems.  Ask me to tell you about the steps to DeBug.  I may need help remembering the words!
We are working with a new tool in Writing Workshop.  Today we used Spaceman to remind ourselves to put spaces between words.  Spaceman goes on our paper between words to remind us to leave space so the reader will know where one word ends and another word starts.  It mighty hard to read when it looks like one long word!
We read a book called Decibella, by Julia Cook.  This book is about a little girl who has a hard time monitoring the loudness of her voice.  Her teacher teaches her different levels for different situations.  They used the word "slurpadoodle" to practice the different levels.  Ask me to tell you about this chart and the voice levels.

We learned about talking bubbles.  When we add talking bubbles to our illustrations, it makes them more interesting.  We looked at some Peanuts comics to see how talking bubbles are used to tell a story.  Ask me to tell you about this comic strip and why school is important, and why I am important to the people at school.  

In math, we have been working tally marks as another to show numbers.  The kids are doing great with this!  We played a game where I flash tally marks and they write the number on their whiteboard.  They were fast, wrote their numbers pretty well with the exception of a few reversals, and could tell what the tally marks looked like.  We are continuing to practice subitizing which means the kids can look at dots, ten frames, tally marks, fingers, collections of things and without counting, know how many there are.  Talking about what we saw as these things are flashed on and off a screen is a great way for kids to get better at subitizing, but also to give them a good foundation of how numbers work when quantities are joined and taken apart.  
We are also measuring in math.  This topic will come back later in the year, but we are spending a little time measuring with non-standard units.  We are using connecting cubes, links, and other items to measure things around the classroom.  We are developing language to tell about what we learned by measuring, especially when comparing items.  We are using words like longer, shorter, taller, wider, etc. and replacing words like bigger and smaller.  

Have a great evening!
​Miss Wolfe