Weekly Schedule:
Monday: Host Nation
Tuesday: Art
Wednesday: Music-Be Safe if You're Trick or Treating :-0
Thursday: P.E.--End of 1st quarter
Friday: No School for Students/Teacher Work Day
Welcome to another new week, and a special welcome home to a few of our student's dads who've come home for R & R. What a great time of year to re-join the Vicenza community. We're so proud of you and appreciate your service to our country.
Our ticker just seems to pass the days so quickly... It's our last in October of this year, and will include another day off on Friday, Teacher Work Day. It's hard to believe that we'll be in the month of November before we know it, and with Parent Teacher Conferences for 2 of those days and Thanksgiving break near the end of the month, it will seem short. We'll work harder than ever, accomplish more than ever and continue on our quest to be readers, writers, problem solvers and above all, thinkers, GREAT ones that is!
Among all the activities of last week were our first Readers' Theatre experience. We had 4 groups of 4 and we each had a part in the play: Jack and the Black Beans. We worked on reading our rhyming words from the _ack family on our spelling list and improved our fluency and phrasing. After we practiced our lines, we acted out the play. It was fun and we'll try it again. We also rehearsed our Oscar Safety Owl song for trick-or-treating. I hope they've been practicing this at home. If you haven't heard it yet, ask them about it.... they have it memorized. We'll travel to other classrooms and share our production on Wednesday. :-O
Many thanks to all those who contributed to our Pumpkin Tasting party. We enjoyed such treats such as pumpkin bars, mini pumpkin pies, fresh roasted pumpkin seeds, apple juice, pumpkin dip w/Nilla wafers, pumpkin pie wedges, seasonal treat bags, pictures from a pumpkin patch in the U.S., stationery to write our own pumpkin patch stories and fancy seasonal plates and napkins. Our table was adorned with seasonal, decorative gourds and we really got in the spirit of the season. Wow, the students were hungry and really had their own form of dining out because of indoor recess. You'll receive one of the recipes in an e-mail attachment this week.
We'll be finishing our My Family writing from Kidspiration. It's a creative software/writing program, where your child virtually illustrates, then writes about their picture(s). They have learned how to use the Goodies menu, which allows them to record their name on the paper, spell check, and import background colors, if they like. It's exciting to have them recognize the word that 'looks right' from the menu of possible correct spellings. Oh, who would have thought they'd learn to use a spell check! You can download a free 30-day trial version and watch a movie about the software. Just google Kidspiration and wa-lah!!
We are working on fact families to 10 and they're becoming quite flexible. This basically uses two addends and their sum in four different number sentences such as: 2+4=6, 4+2=6, 6-2=4, and 6-4=2. This teaches quick recognition and mental computation (instant recall) of facts to 10 and begins to demonstrate the association between addition and subtraction through patterns. Your child should be able to write 4 fact-family number sentences; 2 addition and 2 subtraction from a set of 3 numbers. This will help develop a more fluent ability to show addition & subtraction quickly, and compose number sentences that accompany word problems + and - to 10. This eventually builds to the same skill with + and - facts to 20.
Our new display outside the classroom is a Pumpkin Poem. We drew and colored all different kinds of pumpkins! It goes like this....
Pumpkins large
Pumpkins small
Pumpkins short
Pumpkins tall
Pumpkins yellow
Pumpkins green,
All are ready
For Thanksgiving!
Read those books, as we'll try to get everyone aboard for Reading Counts this week. The books will be from our classroom library and they are at their instructional/independent level of reading. They are learning to monitor their own reading, answer 10 questions about the story and try to score no less than 70% on the test. We're coming right along!
