A new favorite book

Important Dates:

Monday, October 2 - Library
Wednesday, October 18 - Early Release
Thursday and Friday October 19. 20 - No School

Last Friday I was out for appointments and the guest teacher left a wonderful note! The class did great! I'm so proud of how hard they worked to show expected behaviors! Unfortunately, I am out this Friday also. I am a school Wellness Leader and I have a wellness conference to attend. The class and I reviewed our expectations and they are ready to rock it!



Literacy:
This week a read a book that was new to me... and it has quickly become one of my favorites: Charlotte and the Quiet Place by Deborah Sosin and Sara Wooley. The discussion the students had about this book blew me away! After reading the book, we first focused on what we find noisy and hard to deal with... on Friday the students will be drawing and writing about their own quiet places. This student wrote: The fire alarm is loud.

We also have started talking about how to make or reading muscles stronger. We used weights as an analogy... weights that are too light won't make your muscles stronger but are a good warm up. Weights that are too heavy are good all the time either. As Andrew said, "You need books that are just right: a little hard, but not too hard."

We also started putting books in our bags. Our bags of books will be read during reader's workshop. These are mostly just right books, with a few warm ups and a challenge book or two. I love helping the readers get their bags of books set up because I get to know what they like to read and their interests.

Math:
Can you believe we are already working on story problems?! Wow! This week, we have focused n addition story problems. The students need to write and equation, draw a representation (picture), and have an answer with a label.Students often work together during math time, to share their thinking and compare solutions. This way, the mathematicians learn that often there is more than one way (multiple pathways) to solve a problem.

We are also very lucky to have interns from St. Michael's College join us for math. On Thursday, 2 students from Professor Tapper's Teaching Elementary Math class come and help us out. The interns get a great experience seeing math in action and we get some extra help.