Week 2!

Wow, it has been such an incredible 2 weeks!  The students have shown amazing community skills, and have been very kind and helpful to each other.  They have also shown a passion for learning new things, and have been willing to try different learning techniques that I present to them!  I think we are going to have a pretty great year!  Here are some highlights from the last week:

We started out the year by building a time capsule in our visual journals.  Each student has recorded some information about themselves that they will review at the end of the year.  We have written a poem and involved some measurement as well!

We have started a Classroom Sharing Circle that we are using to build empathy and community in our classroom. We have practiced this a few times, and we hope to get better and better at it.

We started library sign out this week.  Each child is allowed to sign out 2 books to bring home and share.  Students chose all sorts of books, from craft books to dragons to beginner chapter books.  Check out your child's book they have brought home!

In gym we have been learning cooperative games and how to play safely on the playground.

Books we have read:

Scholastic was sent home yesterday!  All orders are due by Monday September 18th.

We have been doing all sorts of cross curriculum art for math, inquiry, and just for fun!  Check out the video we used to draw a bee:

In math we have been focusing on measurement.  We were lucky enough to have Mrs. Tuff and Mr. Scout visit us while we were doing height measurements, and they let us measure them!  We hope they will come back at the end of the year so we can see if they grew over the year (or shrunk)!

We have been learning snack etiquette.  During snack time we pretend that our room is a restaurant (we haven't named it yet) and we practice how we would act if we were eating in a restaurant!  The kids have been building their skills around manners and voice levels.

We have been going over the rules for buddy reading.  Students practiced using a whisper voice and sitting elbow to elbow, knee to knee, to show that they can read quietly with a friend.

The students have been showing great independence so far this year!  We have a star student every day who leads our class in Calendar, gets a special chair for lessons, and is the line leader when we head out to different places around the school.  We also have end of day jobs that the students are responsible to complete at the end of the day.  They have been so wonderful at keeping our classroom organized and clean!

Please check out the right hand column of the blog to see upcoming events and due dates for our class.