Oh My It's Late!

Sorry to keep you in suspense! I have been out and about all weekend enjoying the beautiful weather with my family!

This week in class we focused on improving our writing. The students worked on creating a piece of writing, conferencing with me to find places where they could revise and then actually making the revisions! Needless to say we were busy! I am going to use this post as a way to publish the work that some of the students have finished! If you do not see your child's work today look out for it next week!

"Lightning McQueen is racing. He loves to race all day long. He is happy to race. I like to race he said."

"This is a pinata. The pinata has candy."

"Mader is fast. He goes to a workshop! Mader is cold! Mader is a race car!"

"The haunted house is scary. Zombies are at the haunted house. On the haunted house is scare crows."

"The haunted house has skeletons and zombies."

"Doc had a happy day."

"This is a haunted house. There was ghosts inside. The spooky haunted house is crazy. I'm scared of the haunted house. There can't be more in the haunted house."

My love of Halloween may have rubbed off on a few of our writers! :)

Please tell your little writers what a wonderful job they are doing and encourage them to write at home! It is a wonderful idea for little ones to have their own journal at home to write in when ever they have the urge. Encourage them to write notes or letters to others, make lists for birthday wishes or things they need from the store or just to share their thoughts about their days! You'd be surprised by what their little minds think of!

I'll leave you with some shots of them in action!

-Mrs. Richardson

Re-Telling "Five Green and Speckled Frogs" on our stage at recess!

Working on editing sentences to become better writers!

Our wonderful teaching assistant Mrs. Joseph. Mrs. Joseph works very hard with our students everyday!

Remember!!! Our spelling tests (for K students) will now take place each Monday!

Remember to wear your college shirts this week in support of Education Go Get It Week!!

From Rhyming Words to Robots- We did it all this week!

I hope this post finds you and your family enjoying your weekend together. This week in room 12 we explored many different topics and had a great time doing it!

This week we focused on improving our writing with both Pre-K and Kinder students. Kindergarten students had a funeral for all sentences that begin with the following:

"I like....."

"I went..."

"I love...."

"I played..."

"I see a..."

Once students grasp sentence writing we begin with these sentence to help them understand sentence structure and because they are an easy sentence to write. However now that most of our kinders are avid writers they use these sentences as a crutch. After we discussed how these sentences are boring we buried them deep inside a box so they will not be seen in our writing again!

After the funereal we read several books and noticed how real writers write. How they use new words, or vocabulary and try their best to tell an exciting story. I was amazed and so proud of the stories our students came up with after our lesson!

Mason wrote about Jedi's and the movie Star Wars. He didn't just say he likes Star Wars, instead he talked about the characters!

Joanita wrote a beautiful story about a wicked witch and a princess that lived in a tall, tall castle. Sh e used beautiful story language like "Once upon a time" to start her story.

Pre-K students are still working on adding details to their pictures (which is their writing at this time.) The more details we can get them to incorporate into their drawling the more we will see when they are ready to start writing! For Pre-K students that are able to hear some sounds in words they are working hard at labeling their pictures.

When Zion drew a picture of a sun this week he sounded out the word and wrote "SN" next to his picture!

We also spent time practicing Rhyming words. We created an anchor chart together that helped us sort our rhyming words into "Real" words and "Non-sense" words.

After we each came up with a set of rhyming words we created rhyming word puzzles!

On Wednesday we described as many descriptive words and we could think of for size. After creating out list (and expanding our vocabularies!) we used magazine to find pictures of tiny things and gigantic things. Once we found a set we cut them out, glued them in our journals and wrote a sentence to describe the pictures.

During Kinder Time on Thursday the students were introduced to a fun new workstation to help them practice their sight words- Word Tower!

Students take turns pulling blocks that have sight words printed on them out of the tower. We currently have all of our sight words for the 1st and 2nd 9 weeks.

Once they get a block out they have to read the word to their partners.....

 then everyone writes the word on their recording sheet.

Turns them continue until....

the tower falls!

Finally on Friday we had a special visit from Officer Lemon of the Houston Police Department. Officer Lemon brought his friend Gizmo the Robot with him!

 Kinder students learned about calling 911 for people emergencies and what to do if a stranger talks to them.

Yet another busy week has passed by! Below are some other pictures of our friends in action!

-Mrs. Richardson

Working hard to recall numbers during Fun Friday!

Zariyah comparing object's size.

Samantha earned a ton of stickers in her sight word book!

Elijah pulled sight words off of the word wall to create a new sentence!

Pre-K loves practicing their numbers and letters on Starfall.com! If you haven't tried it at home do it today! www.starfall.com

Salvador did a wonderful job on his Reading Mastery take home!

November Calendars

November Snack Calendar

November Rotation Calendar

Hello November

Good morning! I hope you are enjoying this beautiful fall weather!

This week in room #12 we spent some time learning about spiders, practicing our patterning skills and much more!

Early in our week we created a chart sharing the knowledge that we already know about spiders and what we want to know about spiders. Many of the students already knew some fun facts about spiders. They knew that spiders have eight legs and "feelers" on their heads. One thing that we learned about spiders was that spiders are NOT insects they are arachnids!

After learning about spiders the students and I collected data to show how many of our friends are afraid of spiders and how many are not. We practiced using and reading tally marks as we collected the data.

Very few of our friends said that they we afraid of spiders!

We also re-visited one of our favorite pumpkin songs- "Five Little Pumpkins". Students read and re-read the story and then sang the song for Mrs. Joseph all by themselves!

After singing the song the students exercised their fine motor skills and imaginations as they re-crated their own five little pumpkins uses their hands to tear paper without scissors!

 On the morning of Halloween we spent a lot of time talking about costumes. The students wrote a journal entry telling us what they might be for Halloween and even created a costume book!

Samantha was coloring her book very carefully!

 The students and I have been very excited for our materials from Donorschoose.org.  We finally received them and opened them up this week! 

 

Our Donors Choose Site

During kinder time the kindergarten students were introduced to the Hot Dots pens and cards. They had a blast quizzing themselves and their friends!

We also listened to our first book on CD- and it was a great one!

 If you'd like to experience the book at home here is a link to the story being read aloud!

Video of The Little Old Lady Who Wasn't Afraid of Anything 

During the week students all took turns creating patterns using spooky stamps!

Aden made a great Spider, Ghost (AB) pattern!

In preparation for our spelling test the kindergarten students created spelling word puzzles and solved them while practicing their words!

We had our first field trip of the year! Kindergarten students took a bus trip to Davis High School to see a performance of "The Wizard of Oz".

 We finally finished the week with our spelling test and our Friday Funday! All in all it was a great week!

I heard many wonderful stories about fun trick or treating so I will leave you with a picture of my little bumble bee on her first Halloween!

Mrs. Richardson

Marilyn was a bumble bee and her daddy was a bee keeper :)