September!

The Shogan Salamanders are well into their school routine with the exception of guided math.  The kids are friendly and fun and social which makes our classroom a wonderful place to be but presents a challenge when we are tasked with independent or quiet work.  We're going to keep working on it!

In reading we have been making connections, both text-to-self and text-to-text to deepen our understanding of our shared reading.  We've even recorded some as readers' responses (new for the kids) using sentence stems.  Next week we'll delve into character traits, internal and external.  Kids sometimes need clarification separating an emotion from a trait.  A trait is exhibited over time, not just in a moment.

Math is going well.  The kids are secure in their knowledge of two digit numbers represented as a group of tens and ones, can do expanded form and can determine the value in a ten-frame or base 10 blocks.  We'll continue to do 100 puzzles to expand and challenge our thinking.  We've also looked at taking surveys for information and representing that data in a bar graph.  We'll look at pictographs next week and review the entire unit.

Writing is a process.  We're working on personal narratives (they have a setting, beginning/middle/end and describes a small moment).  We're going to do some editing to check our use of capitalization and punctuation and revise to add some "show, don't tell" description and hopefully do our first writing gallery walk next week.

Next week we begin our unit on Physical Properties and the effects of adding/removing heat to matter.  A couple of hands on activities will keep it fun.

Remember, the kids often want a sweater or sweatshirt jacket in the classroom as it gets cold.  Our lunch time is 12:38 and the kids benefit from a small healthy snack at our recess time.

Feel free to contact me anytime!