Building Community & Establishing Routines-
Building a community within the classroom sets the tone and encourages students to be active members of their own learning. Community is about relationships. It’s a place where people come together and feel like they belong. It’s about creating a space where every student feels safe; where students and teachers work together toward a common goal, and celebrate both collective and individual wins. We spend a great deal of time at the beginning of each year learning to work and play together, and we do this in many different ways:
We read How Full Is Your Bucket? and we considered the kind of community that we want to build in our class and brainstormed a list of agreements that we can follow to help make it reality.
We talked about Growth Mindset. A growth mindset is believing in the power of yourself and your brain! We know our intellect and abilities develop when we try difficult things, use the right strategies, and don’t give up. So a growth mindset is when we know with practice, we will get better at something. We may not be able to do something YET but with a little patience and practice we will get it! That power of YET is key!
After a lively discussion we talked about the importance of setting goals for the year. Each kiddo gave it some thought and came up with a math goal, a reading or writing goal, and an SEL related goal.
We played many community building activities like 10 Things about You and Find Somebody Who…
And we spent time personalizing our notebooks so we have a special place to place our hard work.
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Math –
Ms. Andrea’s math group launched our first unit on graphing and number sense! We talked about the ways that mathematicians organize sets of information, to make it easier to read. One way is with graphs. We created a pictograph to show how many pets we have. Next we shifted our focus to the 120 chart. We partnered up for a game of Race to 120!
Later in the week we discussed what makes a number even or odd. We created our own number lines and identified even/odd. We learned that place value matters when determining whether a number is even or odd. Then we played a new dice game in which we tallied our even & odd rolls.
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Ms. Kelly’s math group spends a few minutes each day warming up our math brains. This week we did so by answering math related Would You Rather questions or by showing creative ways to make a particular number. We began our first unit on Place Value and Number Sense and are working with really big numbers- into the hundred thousands! After practicing how to say these large numbers together we independently rolled a die and placed numbers into the place value grids and then read the numbers we created. We also played a partner game for more practice- drawing 6 cards each, the kids would write their number, read it and decide who had the greater number.
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Literacy –
Ms. Kelly’s reading group spent the week reviewing short vowels. We completed a word sort, partner read short stories and answered comprehension questions about what they read in complete sentences. We talked about syllables and how each syllable needs a vowel and that in words with 2 vowels, with 2 consonants in between the vowels, we often divide the syllables between the 2 consonants. Then we practiced syllabication using simpler words to get the hang of it. These explicitly taught skills give the kiddos the tools to decode unfamiliar words rather than guessing. With practice it then becomes intuitive!
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Ms. Andrea’s reading group got our first spelling list! We learned a few word families and practiced spelling words from them with partners. Later in the week we solved 12 task cards that asked questions about this week’s word families. We partnered up again for more practice with our spelling words. Finally, we discussed the importance of embracing a growth mindset around our handwriting and launched the annual Beta handwriting bootcamp. First in print, but cursive is coming soon! Everyone did great on our first spelling check in on Thursday! So proud of these Betas.
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Writing –
We read a book titled What if Everybody Did That? If you drop just one soda can out the car window, it’s no big deal…right? But what if everybody did that? What if everybody broke the rules…and spoke during story time or didn’t clean up. Then the world would be a loud mess! We asked the kiddos to think about our classroom and what would happen if we did not follow our Beta Promises and expectations. Each child took an idea and wrote about the consequences of that particular action. It was a super activity to foster a sense of personal responsibility in our classroom community.
We are bringing back Thursday Letters! It’s been a few years! Every Thursday the kiddos will write a letter to their teachers in their special journal. The teachers will write a letter back for each child to read when they return on Monday. It’s a lovely way to not only practice letter writing skills, but we get to know each other in a whole other way!
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Theme –
We jumped right into theme this week and began with a quick discussion about why we think electricity and magnetism is important and learned a little background about magnets to set us up for success during our Magnet Investigation! 🧲 We also personalized our Travel Journal covers and created a title page for our first theme of the year!
We performed many investigations with magnets! *Testing objects to see if they are attracted to the magnets *Testing if a magnet can attract a paperclip through a variety of thick and thin materials *Creating a magnet train using bar magnets *Stacking ring magnets on a pencil so that no magnets are touching *Discovering which part of a horseshoe magnet is the strongest by testing how many paperclips it can hold AND *Rubbing a magnet on a paperclip and floating it on water to see if it will point north! Like all good scientists, we recorded our findings in our journals.
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