Sound Skills

By this time of the year, our students should be including at least beginning and ending sounds in their writing as well as trying some of our WOW words ( the, me, I). In our Skills Block, we have been working on putting down at least two sounds (beginning and ending) for each word we want to write. You will see examples of this type of work coming home in your student's planner.

For example, students are asked to draw four boxes and place a picture for a particular sound in each box, then they are to label that picture with at least the beginning and ending sounds.
You can see in the example, that the student has taken the next step because she has written middle sounds as well.



We have also done this with picture cards. First, the students sorted the cards by beginning sounds and then used three pictures to label with words.


Another way we are practicing writing down all the sounds that we hear is to finish WOW word sentences. For example, the students were shown the sentence starter: I see a ________. The students were to draw a picture and write the word to complete the sentence.

Our Pumpkin Adventure Begins!

Thank you to all the families that have sent in pumpkins for our Pumpkin Unit. We began our unit this week learning that pumpkins are not always orange! What an amazing fact to start the unit. Most of us (including me) were amazed by all the different colors that pumpkins can be! Even blue! This is a picture of a blue pumpkin from our Class State, Massachussetts!



We started learning about pumpkins by listing all of our questions about pumpkins. Most students wanted to know what different types of pumpkins are there?
We have learned that pumpkins are not only different colors, but we can also sort them by size! We used pumpkins in our class to sort by their size and then make pumpkin patterns :). Check out the three part pumpkin pattern created by our
students!

Literacy Stations

Literacy Stations are apart of our everyday Reader's Workshop. We use Literacy Stations as a time for students to engage in different genres such as, Science books, Math books, books by a certain author, etc. It is also a time for students to practice retelling stories with a puppet, listen to stories on tapes, rereading poetry, and retelling stories with felt. Students are paired with a partner or a group of three based on the strategies that they are focusing on.

These stations last for about 15 minutes following the 15 minutes of Individual Reading time.
During this time, students are working on their own in their stations. Sometimes they will be working on a particular strategy with their partner and/or meeting with me for small group work.