All School Hike and Other Highlights

Hey all!

It was a busy week in our first and second grade class! It has been a real joy getting to know your children better and better each day. We are also getting more and more settled into our days and routines. We had a wonderful day for our All School Hike as well, it was great to see the kids in such bright spirits. It was a wonderful way to end the week. Look at these two hikers enjoying the day:

We have introduced a new part of our literacy time, Word Work. We use the Fountas and Pinnell (See my literacy page for details about this program) word lists for our first and second graders. There is a 25 word list, a 50 word list, 100 word list and a 200 word list. These are all sight words, meaning these are words that we need children to know by rote memory, without having to work on the sounds in the words. Roughly speaking, we expect first grade students to know the 25, 50 and 100 word lists by the end of the year, and for second graders to know all of those plus the 200 word list by the end of their year. Children can work together and quiz one another on reading the words, they can practice writing the words on chalk slates or whiteboards, or they can get quizzed by a teacher.

I also started our beginning of the year reading assessments and I got through about half of the kids. These reading assessments are used to help me develop beginning of the year teaching points (reading strategies, letter sounds, etc.) within small reading groups. We will be starting these groups in the first week of October, when I have the class results.

We talked about Rumney CARES this week as well and we'll be working our way through the rest of the letters next week while developing our class rules. We also are going to be working on some Hopes and Dreams for our year as well. The kids will be making some posters that talk about this that we can hang up in the room.

Over the next few weeks we'll also be starting our first science unit on matter. I'll be working on also introducing our studio time, which is a critical part of Project Based Learning (see the page on Project Based learning to read more).

As always, please be in touch if you have questions about our class or if you'd like to just check in and chat about your child's start to the year. I'm always happy to meet up.

Enjoy the weekend!

~B