November 11

Happy Thursday. It's hard to believe how quickly our days and weeks together fly by. We had a busy day of learning.

We are really practicing how to read to ourselves. We have practiced the physical actions many times. Right now we are reading to ourselves for 3 minutes. We are in the midst of "building stamina." We add a couple of minutes on a week. Our hope is to get to 15 minutes. We are talking about the three ways to read a book: look at the pictures, look at the words, or make up a story to yourself from the pictures you see. It was a big success when we accomplished this today. We even got to watch Ms. Baxter's class as they read independently. We were observers, thinkers and reflectors and after we saw how fun it was to read, we wanted to do it right away. Students will be getting their own book boxes--as soon as you use a box of cereal, will you send it in? These are what we will use to turn into our book boxes. Students will have both books of their choosing and books that I choose that are at their level. This will be the prelude to our small guided reading groups that will start after Thanksgiving break. Our next steps will be learning how to choose a book that "fits" just like we choose clothes that fit us just right.

We were excited to hear from Tina Krech--a local cosmetologist who taught us about hair and skin care, and what it is like at her job every day. It was fun for the students to hear from another member of our community.

We continue to work on number practice (writing and recognition). Please practice counting with your student from 0-35, and have them practice writing from 1-10.

Tomorrow is show and tell day! Don't forget to bring in your show and tell bags with your rhyming words.