Saturday, September 25, 2010

Wow, what a busy week!

We started our RTI (Response to Intervention) groups this week. We have small groups of students learning every where! Some kids are going to the cafeteria to meet with Mrs. Salter, some kids go upstairs to meet with Mrs. Taylor or Mrs. Palisco, some kids meet on the carpet to meet with Mrs. Lynn and some kids meet at the table with Mrs. Soles. We are meeting every morning for 30 minutes for extra intensive instruction. We have lots of good remediation going on. :)
In our classroom this week we started a new genre in writing. We are learning how to write Narrative stories. This first story will be fiction. We have finished mapping out our characters, setting, the problem, the solution, and the events leading up to the solution. We did all of our brainstorming on our "cupcake"! :) Next week we will "jazz up" these elements before we start our sloppy copies.
In reading we are learning how to use all sorts of strategies and tools to help us become better readers. We now know how to use our Oreo, Ice Cream, and 4 Square GO maps. This week we made predictions before, during and after reading our stories using our Prediction Wheels. Ask me about all of these tools and I will tell you about them.
Last week in Math, Mrs. Lynn taught us how easy adding big numbers are if we learn our double facts, like 2 +2=4, 3+3=6, 4+4=8, and so on. We even made flash cards at home to help us memorize these facts. This week we learned how easy it is to add strings of numbers. We will be working more on this next week and will start working on subtraction problems.
We had so much fun investigating soil this week in Science. We explored and studied the difference between three different types of soil. Next week we we will learn what worms do to our garden soil!       

Friday, September 17, 2010

Open House was a Success!!

Wow! Thursday night our classroom was full of students, siblings, moms, dads, grandmas and grandpas. We had around 15 students that were represented. Everyone seemed to enjoy the powerpoint. We saw some great pictures of the students "clowning around"! Mrs. Soles is going to set up our Scholastic website this weekend so that our parents can order their kids books on line. Several students have already taken advantage of borrowing some books from Mrs. Soles' classroom library. We want everybody to be able to attend the end of the year Reading Celebration. So everybody....let's read on!!!

Sunday, September 12, 2010

Our new class blog!

Mrs. Soles decided to set up a blog for our classroom. Our parents will be able to check in to see what is going on in our classroom. Sometimes the blog will be written by Mrs. Soles, sometimes by Mrs. Lynn and then later on in the year, the VIK (Very Important Kid) for the week will write the blog! We look forward to telling you about all of the exciting things that are going on in our classroom this year!
Don't forget...Open House is this Thursday night from 6:00 - 7:30. See you there!