News for September 5

News for September 8

We spent a wonderful first four days together this week! The children wrote stories, played math games, painted pictures and even began to rehearse a play...

In language, the children reviewed the 26 basic printed letter forms of the English alphabet. They practiced writing the CAPITAL, or uppercase, letters and the lowercase letters. We paid particular attention to the lowercase letters as these are written in three different places on the paper. The 7 tall letters, b, d, f, h, k, l, t are the same height as all the capital letters. The 5 below-the-line letters, g, j, p, q, y, begin in the middle of the line space and travel below the line. The 14 middle letters a, c, e, i, m, n, o, r, s, u, v, w, x, z, begin in the middle of the line space and stop at the bottom line.

In art, the class painted pictures of characters and things that they wanted to write about in a story. Then the students each wrote stories about the paintings that they created. After writing the rough copy, each child edited his/her story with me. I will be typing all the stories and they will be displayed with the artwork in the hallway outside of our classroom.

In math, the children reviewed the proper way to write the single digits from 0-9. We began to discuss the concept of place value and how these ten digits can make any number up to infinity! We talked about the 100 chart as a tool to help add and subtract and used this chart to play a game. We discussed the strategy of skip counting and focussed on skip counting by 5's and 10's to 100. At the end of the week, groups of students played the classic board game, "Snakes and Ladders" which is a math game based on an upside down 100 chart.

The children are learning the names and order of the months of the year and they learned a song to help them remember.

The students created large "Room 204 alphabet" letters out of paper. We will use these large letters to create titles for our displays in the hallway.

Finally, the children began a theatre project. We are going to put on plays based on the fairy tale, "The Three Billy Goats Gruff". The class chorally read the script (story) together and then wrote down which character he/she would like to play. The class will be divided into smaller groups next week to act out the play.

Books read aloud this week:

The Incredible Book-Eating Boy by Oliver Jeffers

The Book That Eats People by John Perry

This is My Book by Mark Pete

Do Not Open This Book! By Michaela Muntean