What is Happening in November in K-207?

I cannot believe that we are into the month of November and that we are well into our second month of School! Time does fly when you are having fun.

I hope that you all enjoyed our production of The Three Billy Goats Gruff on Friday for Parents as Enrichment Partners. As I told you on Friday, The Three Billy Goats Gruff was one of our Star Books which was read everyday for one week. The children loved it and wanted to make a play out of it. I think that the children did an excellent job! Enjoy the photos.

For the month of November our Units of Study are as follows:

READING WORKSHOP: Our unit of study for November is called Comprehension and Partnerships. We will be spending 25 minutes reading independently. For the first 12 minutes, we will read during “private time” where we sit back-to-back with our reading partners. Then, we switch to “partner time.” During this time, we will share one book with our partner. We will be learning to give our partners book introductions and how to discuss the characters in our books with our partners. We will practice reading strategies such as Turn Taking (I read a page, you read the next page), Echo Reading (I read a page, you echo me), and Choral Reading (we read each page at the same time). We will “shopping” for new books every week to keep in our individual classroom book baggies. We will keep five books in these bags: one Star Book (a familiar story we had read to us 4 times in class) three Just Right books (a leveled book that we can “read” on our own), and one Look Book (a book with interesting pictures we want to discuss with our partners).

SHARED READING: We will begin to make a switch from reading poems and rhymes to reading simple enlarged texts (Big Books). We will be practicing the same strategies for reading that we practiced with our big poems (looking for patterns, rhymes,) and learning some new strategies such as taking picture walks and using the pictures to help us read the text.

WRITING WORKSHOP: We have been writing so much in K-207. In October, we learned how to write across three pages in our Personal Narrative Unit of Study. We learned to pay close attention to stretching out each word slowly and writing down each sound that we hear. We also learned how to read back our own writing and make sure our sentences have spaces. For November, we are becoming Scientists and looking very closely at leaves. We collected leaves in Prospect Park last Wednesday and are examining them very closely as a Scientist would do. We learned that leaves have veins (or bones), they are different shapes, some leaves have edges, some are big while other are small. We are making books about our findings.

WORD STUDY: We have begun using Words Their Way, a program that teaches children to use spelling, phonics, and vocabulary through picture and word sorts. This program teaches students how to look at words so that they can construct an ever-deepening understanding of how spelling works to represent sound and meaning. We are using this word study program for 10 to 15 minutes of practice every day. The children are working in small groups, doing various sorts such as sorting pictures by beginning sounds, sorting letters of various fonts, and sorting pictures that are the same. To complement this program, I have begun teaching the children one high frequency word (sight word) a week. Our sight words so far are: the, and, a, I and in. We have learned that when we see a sight word in a book, we can read it “in a snap” and when we want to write a sight word, we can also write it “in a snap.” We can also look on our classroom word wall to find a word that we already learned.

MATH WORKSHOP: We are having such a good time doing hands-on activities in Math Workshop. This month, we will look for symmetry in autumn leaves, explore the balance scale, and begin investigate the temperature. We continue to do math word problems everyday.


SOCIAL STUDIES: We have investigated our found materials or "beautiful stuff" that the children brought into class. We sorted, compared, constructed and created, various projects with our beautiful stuff. This unit was open-ended, and we are allowing the children to take the lead as to where their "beautiful stuff" took them. Outside our classroom on the bulletin board are collages of the found materials that the children created. Enjoy it.

Reminders:

*Monday, November 10 - Prospect Park Zoo Trip for K-207
*Tuesday, November 11- No School
*Thursday, November 20th-Parent Teacher Conferences (sign up sheet for times will be sent home