Halloween

Last week we learned about the holidays Halloween and Day of the Dead, which is a great introduction to customs in the country of Mexico, which we will study later this year. Below are some photos of holiday read alouds, kids making "creepy carrots" based on the book of the same title, and everyone at our harvest party. Thank you so much to everyone who joined us and helped out!

Reading Strategies

During the months of September and October we have been using our Readers' Workshop lesson time to learn about reading strategies. These give students tools to solve tricky words when they come to them in their books. Our reading strategies include check the picture, think about the sounds in the word, think of what would make sense, look for word families/chunks you know, read past the puzzling word then come back and re-read the sentence, try a different pronunciation for letters (especially vowels), and break the word into smaller parts. An important part of our discussion of strategies is that we almost always use several together. We often need to check the picture, look at the sounds, think of what makes sense, etc together.

Entering November we have switched our whole group lesson focus to discussions about character, main idea, and retelling stories. Small groups (which meet after the main lesson while the class is reading independently) are still working daily on reading strategies and reading skills targeted at their individual needs.

Here are some photos of a whole group lesson when I am modeling how to use the strategy, "read past the puzzling word then go back and read the sentence again." There is also a photo of one of our classmates coming up to the document camera to show the class how he had used the same strategy in his own reading!

Community Helpers

This week we are wrapping up learning about community helpers. On Monday we walked to the fire station down the road to learn about fire fighters! This week students also made flip books with their picture showing themselves as different community helpers, they interviewed a family member about their job to learn how different jobs help the community, and they thought about a community helper they would want to be when they grow up (then we shared them in class).

Mr. Antonicci's Birthday

Mr. Antonicci had a big birthday yesterday and we all made paper ties to wear in a photo with him (since he always wears a tie to school)! Happy Birthday, Mr. Antonicci!

This week!

This week we had open house, celebrated a birthday, and we are fully in the swing of our first grade schedule. During math and reading students rotate between different work activities (read to self, RAZ Kids or Lexia, and teacher guided groups for reading and game, Dreambox, and teacher guided group for math). Students can use RAZ Kids and Dreambox at home by using links on this blog. Dreambox is listed in the "student links" on the right side and RAZ Kids is listed at the top of the blog as Kids A-Z reading. Please check these out! They are wonderful supplemental programs.

Next Monday we are walking to the fire station to learn more about community helpers! 

Here are a few photos from our week.