Our Week – September 12

Shared ReadingIt is hard to believe that we’ve completed our third week of school.  It’s been a week of adding routines and guidelines to support our work.  We’ve been clarifying expectations for reading and how we will use our writers’ notebooks.  We’ve been learning how to keep track of the ways we practice our math facts.  And we’ve been enjoying one another.

3E Rules

Our social-emotional learning focus has been centered on responsible decision making.  We’ve been thinking about how we show respect for one another and how we are each contributing to the well-being of our class and our school.  Two weeks ago each child wrote down two or three rules they thought we should follow as a class.  Those were collected on a list of nearly twenty.  Our next step was to decide which rules felt most important to us to follow.  They all were, but we wanted a list we could manage.  We thought that some on the list were very similar.  After voting, rearranging and writing an introduction, we completed the rules we will use to guide our choices and our work together in 3E.  Here they are:

We’ll make the world a better place if we follow our rules.

  • Be safe.
  • Treat others as you’d like to be treated.
  • Always be nice.
  • Only say kind things.
  • Be helpful.
  • Listen.
  • Include others.
  • Be yourself – it’s okay to be different.

                                  signed 3E

Now that our class rules are set, our next steps will be to set individual goals to increase independence and develop skills with self-management and self-direction.reading together

Reading Guidelines

Thank you everyone for helping us build a terrific reading museum on Tuesday.  It was a lot of fun to see how everyone has grown and developed as a reader.  It seemed as though the class really enjoyed looking back and remembering great books shared as a family, the books that were first read and books that have been passed on to the next generation of readers.

Since we know we have all grown as readers and that we continue to grow as long as we continue to read, we established some guidelines for our reading time in the classroom.  These are centered on the choices we make.   Some books are fun to look at and browse through.  Some books are fun and quick to read.  There are many different types of books – genre, they are called.  It is good to try to read different types of books to stretch and grow our understanding.

We are working to grow into 40 minutes of reading a day.  Our goal is that at least half of that time will be spent reading “just right” books.  Other time might be spent with books like record books, almanacs, or comics.  This reading is other done in bits and pieces or for fun.   If we are able to do that, I am wondering how many books we can read this year.narrative writing

Writing Expectations

We’ll be writing every day.   The class knows that.  We have generated a list of the types of things people write.  Ginger told us that people, “write to know their story.”  Sam, the main character from Library Mouse told us to “write what we know.”  Ms. Mirabel from Word After Word After Word told us, “You have a story in there, Lucy.  Or a character, a place, a poem, a moment in time.  When you find it, you will write it.  Word after word after word after word.”  She also said, “Real or unreal.  They’re just about the same.  They are both all about magical words.”

The struggle for some writers in our class is deciding what to choose.  Others struggle with the need to be writing something wonderful and exciting every time.  Our writers’ notebooks will be collections, places we will gather our ideas and begin our stories.  Our hope is that they will be collections of our drafts and attempts that we will dip into throughout the year to find something we will develop and grow and publish.

Because sometimes having an idea to start from is a challenge, we have also begun an idea book.  It is a collection of favorites and memories, people and descriptions that might work to spark a new idea when we find ourselves wonder how to choose and how to decide what to write next.

Bits and Pieces

  • We finished our second chapter read aloud this week – Word After Word After Word.  Ask your child about his or her favorite memory from that book.
  • Ask your child what they have discovered about trees.
  • You may want to find out if they remember the steps for each scientific inquiry and about the two different experiments they conducted this week.
  • We will be celebrating DOT DAY on Monday, September 15.  We’ll be making our mark and seeing where it takes us.
  • Our first Challenge with Mr. Caron is on Tuesday, September 16.
  • Picture Day is also Tuesday, September 16.  The forms are in the Friday envelopes.

math togetherlearning about treestesting our hypothesisrecording observationswriting togetherchromatography

 

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