Our first full week was a busy one! Routines are falling into place and we are easing our way into the curriculum. We reviewed 16 letters, keywords, and sounds in Fundations and began using our Student Notebooks and dry erase boards to begin handwriting.
The children had a chance to explore the math manipulatives and naturally began sorting, building, designing, and planning with them.
We started to share our "forever books" and achieved our goal of reading independently for 5 minutes. We will be working hard building our stamina as the year progresses. We created a chart of "Million Dollar Vocabulary Words" to remind us of all of the smarty pants words that we learn from books, discussions, and others and now know and can use (including stamina–being able to do something for a long time without getting tired or giving up). Writer's Workshop is also under way. Everyone has beautiful brand new folders to store all of their treasured stories in. We have read a bunch of wonderful stories (some shown here) and had many rich discussions. We created a list of things we aspire to do in our class.
We read the story Chrysanthemum and found out about the stories behind our own names. The red heart that is hanging in our classroom is a reminder about how it feels when people say mean things to us or tease us, just like in the book.
Patriot Day, Charlie Caps, Friday Fun, and homework rounded out the fun!
Hope you have a great weekend!