Our guided reading groups began this week. There was real enthusiasm about the stories this week. This group time reading and discussing is invaluable for all of us. I am able to observe reading from the students and we are able to learn from each other's answers in discussion. In our various centers we covered many things.

The beginning, middle and end of the story has been talked about and illustrated, computer game called Reading Rodeo center where the students could identify initial consonant sounds was a great tool to drive home letter recognition and upper and lower case letters. I shared a favorite big book, I went walking, with the class. The book is a great example for the students of the importance of the stories illustrations...to help tell a story. The illustrator draws just enough of a picture of the animal to appear on the next page for the students to predict. We love prediction in stories! The students easily identified the sequence of the animals in the story.

We also had some short vowel sounds games and consonant blend games in the centers. Miss Taylor introduced their word books to them and did some activities with them at a center to teach them how to find words in their word book, either by topic or by beginning letter of the word. This will help them become more independent in their spelling. You would love to have this at home when they ask you, "how do you spell?...."

This class made some beautiful Family Trees with watercolor paints and their hands. Ask them how much they loved getting their arm painted and their hands. Who needs brushes anyway? Look over the pictures. Come and see the finished product when you are at school.

The "How I Got My Name" papers came in this week and these first graders did an amazing job learning about their names. We began 7 of them this afternoon. We look forward to more next week.

Mrs. Waller brought in a caterpillar this week and "he" munched on parsley all week. In Science we have had great discussions about living and non-living things. We made a Venn Diagram of a living things and non-living things. The similarities go in the middle of the Venn Diagram. Have your child show you. First we listened to the story Edith, Ellen Eddy, then we made a Venn Diagram with one side showing what Edith,Ellen, Eddy was like and the other side what her mother wanted her to be like. In the middle we had the similarities.

All living things change and grow and need water. In Science, we did the celery experiment to observe if celery takes up water through it's stem. We put food coloring in one jar with the celery and plain water in the other. We made many predictions about what we think will happen to the celery. We are going to see if our predictions were accurate on Monday. We think sitting over the weekend might produce better results.

We will talk more about the homework folder. There are questions every night at dismissal about whether this needs to stay home or bring back. When the sight words went home today, for example, it is a leave at home piece. However, that doesn't mean that they shouldn't study them. I told them that.

Homework:

Family Collage due 9-27-10 Samples of past years below

Practice Sight Words as ongoing homework