Happy Thanksgiving!

 
The moment I came home on Tuesday, my lap was enveloped by a 52-pound lap dog.  She’s thankful that I will be home so she can smush with me.   I am thankful for a dog who loves to love.  She a smushy girl and I appreciate our time spent cuddling when I get home from work.  She enjoys hearing about my day.  I tell her about your amazing kids all of the time.  :)  

Here’s something else I’m thankful for…all of YOU!  I love and appreciate your children so very much and I feel lucky to spend my days with them.  We have a lot of fun together!  Thank you for all that YOU do to make our lives better.  

Enjoy your holiday break!

Writing About Reading, Matilda, and Reading Groups

Oh Harriet!  What a fun character she is!  Kids did a great job writing about her.  The illustrations are FANTASTIC!

We read a LOT.  We also write a LOT too.  We spend a fair amount of time creating anchor charts.  These charts are really fun to make together and we continue to use them for weeks afterward.  

Kids got a new label for their Reader's Notebooks.  They LOVE writing about their books!  Such great work.

We continue to write about Matilda.  Such fun to talk about the characters in this story!  The Trunchbull  is a horrific women and she's beastly.  That makes for great reading.  :)  

We have been busy.  Your kids have done an amazing job keeping up with their reading groups while I assess everyone.  They are AMAZING.  They stay focused, are on topic, give great assignments, and take it very seriously.  It’s so fabulous.  We also spent time this week discussing and practicing how to write about what we are reading.  Again, they have such great ideas and contributions to make to our conversations.  I LOVE hearing their conversations and listening to their thoughts about the books we are reading.  Reading groups have studied their characters – take these amazing hamsters for example.  Harriet the Hamster is hilarious.  We giggle a lot when reading this book together.  Who am I kidding?  We giggle in ALL of our reading groups.  J  Reading with your kids makes me so happy.  They have such wonderful things to say and I love how excited they always are. 

Spreading Kindness

Every morning, for our morning message, kids need to write something.  We write lists, stories, poems, and sometimes we write important words we later discuss in our morning meeting.  This week, we started to write a list about KINDNESS.  On Monday, kids wrote one way to be kind.  We then shared our words and had a discussion about kindness throughout the day.  On Tuesday, they started a list of ways to be kind to one person in their life.  Choosing someone, they wrote all of the kind things they could do for this person.  Speaking to one another in a kind way.  Saying kind words to both our friends and people we don’t know as well, or smiling at someone are all ways we can contribute to a world that could always use more kindness.  It was so wonderful to hear their ideas and I loved how thoughtful they were.  Three cheers for KINDNESS!

Fractions

It’s fraction season!  We started our fraction unit this week and we are off to a great start.  We do a lot of work using the white board and getting the chance to learn from each other.  People use different strategies to solve the same problem and it’s great for everyone to hear how others solved it.  We are learning a lot of vocabulary words – some of which will look familiar from last year. WoOoOT!

Morning Meetings…Story Telling

We created (very) short stories using Storymatic for kids.  WOW!  SO.  MUCH.  FUN.  You pick up three cards and your story starts to take shape!  We told our stories to one another, but you can DRAW it, ACT it, or SING it too!  Such a fun way to get ideas flowing and the giggle flowing too.  Ask your kids what cards they picked and the story they told.  We will do this again.  And again.  And again.  After we picked our cards, they had a moment to think about their stories.  We moved around the room and told different people.  It was spectacular.