Week of Oct. 29th

Trick-or-Treat Inspired Writing and Reading

Halloween fun over the weekend was a great springboard to some new writing and reading skills in our classroom this week.  The children were introduced to story writing where they could choose the topic for their writing for the day - many chose Halloween, but they were free to decide for themselves.  They began by drawing, encouraged to add details, told the story to me so it could be recorded, and then they wrote the most important part themselves.  We continue to work on using letters/sounds that we have learned in our Jolly Phonics.  Meanwhile, the other children tried "picture reading" to tell a story by looking at the pictures and words they know rather than just "turning the pages" of the book.  Whispering the story so we didn't interrupt another friend's story was actually the hardest part!

Poems, Songs, and Morning Message

A new trimester brings a new Morning Message routine as well!  We began the week with a fun Trick-or-Treat poem and used it to learn and reinforce "Concepts of Print" such as: picture clues, repeated text, letters/sounds we know, environmental print (yummy candy), punctuation, and words we see often.  The children called them "Snap" words because after a while, you can read them "in a snap!"  It helped that a friend has learned to snap recently and has been teaching his friends this cool skill!  In addition, our Morning Message for sign-in has expanded to reading a sentence.  The same concepts of print are reinforced here as the children share the pen to help write letters, words, or rewrite the message.  We also discuss what strategies they used to read a word to help them "think like readers" such as:

• Saw the word before.
• Know the letters in that order.
• Used the picture clues.
• Matched the picture to the word.

We are just getting started, but it is exciting to see the children make even more connections with print! I will try to include the poem/song and Morning Message photo each week so that you can reread it with your child at home.  Also, the children want to take home the sign-in sheets from the week, so those will be coming home for your reading pleasure much like our Big Books come home.  Thanks for your support of these growing literacy skills at home! 

 Do You Like Spiders?

Our discussions this week came from talk about what is scary!  We had a great talk after Halloween about things that scare us, and we tried to find common things among the list - things that have teeth, make strange noises.  One item that had come up before was spiders, so we did a little experiment.  We did a graph of how many people liked/did not like spiders, and then we set out to learn more about them - interesting facts, fun songs, and creative projects followed.  We will see if our perceptions of spiders change after we learn more about them!