Hello October!

Last week we welcomed Autumn, October and started our reading groups in room #12! Below is a look into our busy week!

Our classroom is a Direct Instruction classroom which means that we use the "Reading Mastery" and "Language for Learning" curriculum. Students are grouped based on their current reading abilities, ranging from knowing no letter names/sounds through fluently reading, and meet each morning with Mrs. Richardson for a Reading Mastery lesson and then with Mrs. Joseph for Language for Learning lesson. Below is a brief summary of the topics covered in each program.

• Language for Learning provides practice in vocabulary, variety of word and sentence forms, the development of precise word knowledge, and in hard to teach concepts such as some/all/none and same/different.

• Reading Mastery is proven to help students decode and comprehend the meaning of print effortlessly, even students who are seriously at risk of failure.

• After each Reading Mastery lesson, starting next week, students will complete a "take home sheet" which reinforces the skills covered in the oral lesson. Please look over these sheets as they come home in the Friday folders and have your child read, or explain the sheet to you!

 As we welcomed fall this week we celebrated the cooler weather (yet to come!) by talking about apples and leaves!

One of our favorite books was "10 Apples Up On Top"

After reading the story Pre-K students practiced creating AB patterns with their own apples.

They were really concentrating!

Students "read" their patterns as they added each apple.

We also practiced math vocabulary as we re-read the story by stating who had the most apples, who had the least apples and who had equal or the same amount of apples!

 During Kinder time Kindergarten students sorted a pile of leaves and created their first graph! We discussed how graphs are a great way to share "data" or information!

First we sorted the leaves by color.

Then we transferred our data to a bar graph!

 Later in the week during Kinder Time kindergarten students were given access to a giant  pile of leaves with a mission- Create a fun fall pattern!

Before being able to touch the leaves they had to tell me what kind of pattern they were going to make- AB, AABB, ABC, ABB or AAB. Below are the fantastic patterns they created!

Pre-K students focused on the letter "M, m" this week as you have seen on their homework calendar!

To help create a wide word bank for writing time we created an "M,m Word List". Students had to put the "mmmmmm" sound in their head and think of a word that began with the letter M. After each student gave a word we took turns finding all the letter M,m's and telling the class if the M was a capital M or lowercase m!

Jaspreet found a lowercase m in the word monkey!

 After several lessons on the basics of writing for kinder students and how to properly use a pencil and paper for Pre-k students We earned our "professional writing journals this week!

Kinder students first entry in our new journals was about their favorite thing to do at school!

Pre-K students drew a picture of their family and practiced labeling their pictures with letters or words!

 After a busy and fun week we celebrated on Friday with a math facts race! Students were given an addition or subtraction fact and the first one to give the correct answer won a point for their team!

They were so incredibly focused that by the end they were rattling off facts for fun!

On Friday we also had our first encounter with shaving cream! The students practiced writing letters, numbers and shapes as I called them out.

And of course we practiced our names too!

I hope you enjoyed your look into our classroom! You may have noticed that many of the things we are working on have not come home yet. This is because we are saving them all for you to see at Open House on Tuesday October 15th.

-Mrs. Richardson