During Reader's Workshop, we read our latest Let's Find Out magazine about picking pumpkins. We learned that pumpkins can come in many different sizes, colors, and textures. We all had fun reading the repeating line: "Pick a perfect pumpkin." While reading our magazine, we learned that the more ribs (lines) a pumpkin has, the more seeds it has. If you have a pumpkin at home, have your child check out the number of ribs and make a prediction if he or she thinks it will have a lot of seeds or not! We also have been talking about "old favorite" stories during Reader's Workshop. These are stories the children have heard a lot and can recite or can tell my looking at the pictures. We read a Halloween "old favorite" this week: Five Little Pumpkins. We practiced choral reading our little early reader books and we even learned our first sight word. Sight words are words commonly found in text and are words that cannot be sounded out. Our first word was "the". We found this word quite a bit in Five Little Pumpkins! Each child found and circled the word "the" in his or her early reader book and then practiced reading it with a partner. Everyone did a great job! See if you child can find the word "the" when you are reading together at home! Just when we thought we were done with pumpkins, we also painted and collaged our own Five Little Pumpkins scenes!
We continued our pumpkin theme with an engineering task related to the Five Little Pumpkins. The children worked in partnerships to create a gate that five little (candy) pumpkins sit on. They could only use straws and play doh and their five candy pumpkins. These engineers worked very hard to create their gates and found out that engineers have to try many ideas before they find one that works. There were lots of trials and errors, but they all persevered! Be sure to ask your child about his or her gate. Did your child and partner get the pumpkins to sit on the gate? What worked well? What was hard?
In Writer's Workshop, we continue to tell stories about our lives through illustrations. This week we focused on adding clothing to the characters in our stories. We talked about the importance of drawing clothing that makes sense and goes with the story. Writer's Workshop continues to be a highlight of the week for many children. What did your child write about this week? Speaking of writing, we learned two new letters this week: I and U. These letters were special because they were the first two vowels we have learned. We talked about how vowels make two sounds, but we will focus mostly on the short sounds. After practicing letter formation and brainstorming words that begin with these letter sounds, the children read and colored letter books. Can your child tell you the sounds of I and U and can he or she show you the hand movements to go with the sound?
In math, we learned a new game called Count and Compare. In this partner game, the children each turn over a ten-frame card filled with dots. They have to decide which card has a greater number of dots and which have a lesser number of dots. They put the cards on the game board and then spin a "greater than and less than spinner" to see who wins the cards. Ask your child to tell you about this fun new game! To continue with the pumpkin theme, we played a Roll and Color game on a pumpkin. This was a partner game in which a child rolls a die and colors in that many dots on a pumpkin. The winner is the partner who ends up coloring in the most dots on the pumpkin!
Lastly, we had our Second Step lesson with Ms. O. This week's lesson was about identifying and naming two feelings: happy and sad. We talked about how we can tell how people are feeling by looking at their facial expressions and body language. We also acted out feelings and learned a new feelings song. There is a paper in your child's Friday Folder that gives more information about this week's lesson.
Just a reminder that the Picture Re-take day is on Monday, October 21st. Please let me know, if you have not already, if your child will be getting re-takes so I can make sure to get him or her on the re-take schedule. Also, please not that there is no school this Friday, October 18th. Have a great weekend!
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