BOY…what a week
it has been. I hope you all enjoyed your
Labor Day weekend. I know I always LOVE
having one extra day to spend with my
family. As I was walking around my
neighborhood this past weekend, I passed by the house of one of my previous
students. He came up to say “hello” to
me (as he was outside with his family) and proceeded to say that the school was
SO nice to let the kids have an extra
day off. Kids say the funniest
things sometimes. It is so interesting
to see the world through a child’s mind.
WE, and when I say we I mean all teachers and administrators, didn’t
have an extra day off as this child
put it. WE were busy at work. As you may remember, instead of having
several early out days throughout the year, we opted for one full day off so as
to give the teachers and administrators MORE time for professional development. So, we thank you for our one extra day off. These days will allow teachers with the
available time needed to improve the learning and successes in our school.
I would like to give a SHOUT
OUT to all my parents who ordered from
Scholastic Book Clubs. Your books should
be arriving soon. I placed the order on
Wednesday. I am so happy that many of
you are utilizing the online manner in which to order your books. This is quick and simple and helps us earn
more books for our classroom. You’ll be
happy to know that with YOUR HELP our class RAISED OVER 300
BONUS POINTS for our classroom library. In addition, with YOUR HELP our class earned 20 dollars in FREE BOOKS!!! With our 20
dollars, I purchased 8 new books for our classroom library. Many of them will go into our leveled portion
of our library. The students use the
leveled portion of our classroom library daily for their Reader’s Workshop
daily 5 stations. These books are read
so many times and I want to be able to offer a wide variety of books that meet
the needs of our students. Not only do I
want the students to be able to read the books I want them to be INTERESTED in
the books in our library. I am working
towards getting more books for our library that the kids have shown interest
in. If you would like to help build up
our leveled library…ask me how you can help.
With such a short week,
the students have been very busy. We
didn’t waste any valuable instructional time this week…but instead went full steam ahead! We have almost completely started ALL DAILY 5 ROTATIONS!!! Students are LEARNING strategies to add to
our CAFÉ board and using those strategies during Read to Self and Read to
Someone. We have even included our
Listen to Reading Station this week.
Of
course we always round out the DAILY 5 with our daily phonics instruction and
our writer’s workshop. You might be wondering
what our CAFÉ board is. Well…CAFÉ is an
acronym for Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency, and Expanded Vocabulary. Our CAFÉ board is a menu of sorts, but
instead of a menu of food it is a menu of reading strategies that good readers use while reading. Each day in our reader’s workshop, I teach a
short mini-lesson in which I model/teach a reading strategy that good proficient readers use while
reading. We discuss the importance of
each strategy and then place it under the appropriate heading on our CAFÉ board. The board gives the students a visual of all
the strategies they have learned and can use while reading a story. In the future, the CAFÉ board will be a way
the students can monitor their own reading and will include the students’ current
reading goals. Currently, the students
have been introduced to the following strategies, check for
understanding, cross checking, and tune into interesting words.
Has your student come home and mentioned our awesome MIMIO. The MIMIO is an interactive
whiteboard.
This neat little device, when hooked up to a projector and
computer, makes a regular plain Jane whiteboard become an interactive
whiteboard. It really is one of the
neatest things I’ve ever seen. Well…needless
to say I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT IT!!! This
little gizmo is running all day in our classroom. From the time the students come into the room
till the time they leave, we use our interactive board about as often as we
can. When the students come in every
morning they do their attendance and lunch count on the MIMIO. Our daily phonics instruction is also completed
in an interactive way on the MiMIO as students move letters around on the
interactive board to create new words and sort words by initial sounds and
rhyming patterns. During math, the line
leader conducts Calendar time on the MIMIO and our math lesson for the day is
also completed on the interactive whiteboard.
In the afternoon, science and social studies units are often interactive
MIMIO lessons. Can you tell that WE LOVE
OUR MIMIO. Sometimes I wonder how I
taught without all the wonderful technology our school now has to offer. Every class has an interactive board of some
sort, either by a SMART or Promeathean Board or a MIMIO. The students love getting to use the
interactive board and I do my best to use it as often as I can so the students
will benefit from the technology we have available in our classroom. Coming soon….the students will be introduced
to Read to Self on the computer. YES
THAT’’S RIGHT….reading on the computer.
We have a traveling laptop cart in first grade and one week out of the
month our class will contain 5 laptops for our use all day during our allotted
week. I’m so excited about introducing
this new fun way of reading. We will
also use our laptop cart for publishing our written work. In addition, students who finish work early
may also have the opportunity for enrichment activities on the computer. I just KNOW this will spark an interest or
two in the class!!! STAY TUNED for more
technology updates….YES , you heard me…MORE!
(We have more techno goodies to use throughout the year as well!) Can’t wait to hear more about them…then come
back and visit us soon!!!!
DON’T FORGET to check out ALL
academics updates on the page off to the right entitled Academic Updates.
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