Highlights of the Week 4.10.15

Dear Families,

Time flew by this week--I don't know how it's already Friday!

This week we finished our sound unit. Did you see your child's scientist journal come home with all of our observations and ideas from our sound experiments? We also began a new social studies unit on Maps. We talked about what maps are and why they are important. We made our first map of our bedrooms and practiced drawing a map from a "bird's eye view." This is a really hard concept so we'll be making lots of maps to practice this skill.

In literacy we talked about the general rule for vowel teams--"when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking." However, we also talked about how there are always rule breakers. We reviewed the most common vowel teams for the long a and long e sounds on our vowel team poster. This is a resource always up in our room, having the letters-keyword-sound for each vowel team. Having a picture clue and keyword help us to remember the sound each vowel team typically makes.

In writing we finished color coding and cutting out our facts. On Thursday I did a mini-lesson showing how to use all the facts from one topic and try to put them in an order that makes sense and sounds good. Sometimes we needed to add words or change them to make it sound right. This editing process is a challenging piece of writing but important to begin to practice even in first and second grade. Next week we'll continue working on organizing all of our facts into "topic pages" for our reports!

On Friday we cashed in 82 sight word tallies that we'd banked as a class for 41 minutes of bonus recess! On Thursday we got to see the dress rehearsal of Honk! which has performances here at Rumney on Friday and Saturday. Check it out if you're around this weekend--it was an amazing production!

This week I was part of the hiring committee for the new music teacher. Our class was selected to be the "demonstration" class so we can see the teacher candidates in action. This means that next week our class will have some extra music time!

We have one more week before vacation and a lot in store--academics and special events, too! On Tuesday Mrs. Woodard has a duo of fabulous story tellers coming in to share their art with us. Don't forget we will be performing a song at the All School Meeting on Thursday (2:30-3:15). We'll also have 4 Winds on Friday next week.

Have a great weekend!