Back again to the blog - I apologize for the long absence. I've a ridiculous meeting schedule after school for the past several weeks, which has now cleared up, so I'll be back to posting Monday - Thursday as often as I can.
After our normal AM routines, we celebrated our new Star of the Week - Owen. He read his poster to us, and then answered questions about his info. Then we moved on to Reader's Workshop - today the mini-lesson was about "Cover Clues" - looking at the covers of books to get clues about what the book will be about, as well as the genre. When the kids went out to read, they were looking at the covers to try to get clues, and then we shared their 'discoveries' at the end-of-workshop share.
During Writer's Workshop, we began looking at pre-writing skills - the kids divided a paper into 8 sections, and then planned (not wrote) a story - we will go back and write the stories in the coming days.
After that, it was time for lunch and recess, an d then back up to our room for Literacy Time. During this time, we will be doing out Spelling, which we call 'Word Work' (your child will either be a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday Speller - and bring home their words that day, as well as have their test [we call it a 'check-in']). We also began a "Story Study" about the traditional Stone Soup story - we will be reading several versions of the story (today we read this version) and comparing them.
After that, we headed down to the gym for class, and then back up for Math Workshop. Today in Math Workshop we worked on writing numbers sentences for subtraction (7-5=2, for instance) that relate to stories and situations.
At the end of the day, we started a new Science/Health unit on Nutrition and Food, which will lead directly into our Stone Soup celebration in two weeks (more info to come soon). Today we talked about foods that are good for our bodies and foods that are not so good for our bodies.
