Week Six

A four day week that saw us delving deeper into Math work, watching our first story plays, learning some 'trick words', and performing a trio of songs in front of the entire school.

Creating our News   

One of the pleasures of News is watching it grow over the course of the year and more than that in seeing the growth of each child's skill over this period.  

Ice Eagle word study
This week the Ice Eagles began their study of trick words, those words in our language that that cannot be sounded out phonetically, e.g. the and of. These are high frequency words that must be readable on sight in order to build fluency in reading. 

Miscellaneous pictures at circle 

Read Aloud
Still floating down the chocolate river

Practicing Handwriting

We have been fortunate to have a credentialed Canadian teacher and visiting scholar, Vanessa, in our classroom for several of the past days 

All School Assembly - Showcase of Learning

Laurel Creek performed three songs at Thursday's assembly.  These are songs that support our word study.  We sang Sh Sh Sh (a song about the sh digraph), Traveling Train (the ch digraph), and The Vowel Song (about the vowels and their sounds). 

Math Workshop- Magnitude

Both groups have been comparing the magnitude of numbers this week.  We have learned how to denote this mathematically by using the greater than and less than symbols and strengthening our concept of magnitude in numbers by playing games like Top It (AKA War) and others.

Here I am in October
Come see our October self portraits
media: glue and chalk pastels

Afternoon Message
Because the assembly usurped our Morning Message, two students took it upon themselves to create an afternoon message which we read at the end of the day.  

A small moment for figuring 
using the hundreds board to solve a real life math problem.  If there are only 13 attendance animals remaining and we should have 23, how many are missing? 

Free Friday

 homemade Bey Blades

Read Aloud

Story Plays
In this activity students dictate a story to a teacher who writes down their every word.  The student and teacher then make a list of characters. Just ahead of production time roles are assigned to other students in the classroom and the teacher reads aloud the story while students act out their parts.  

Story plays give teachers an opportunity to capitalize on a child's intrinsic motivation to tell their own stories.  It is immensely satisfying to the child to see their words brought to life by their classmates and to see that their stories have an immediate audience.  This allows the child to begin viewing him/herself as a writer. 

Open work time

Finally, a magic trick:

child disappearing into own coat as bewildered princess looks on.

Have wonderful weekends!

Ben & Cate