September 6th, 2013

With a super-fast short week I fell behind in the picture taking department. So please excuse the wordy post for today. J

Writing this week we did a lot of free write. I want kids to get used to writing for 15-20 minutes each day. We did start our study of fiction writing on Friday. We will be exploring the parts of fiction books and then working to write our own fiction stories to publish.

In reading this week we continued work on our stamina in reading. The students have to have 2 good-fit books on their desks each day. Then we discussed that stamina is real reading (eyes in books, reading words, not talking) and practiced working to get our independent reading stamina up. We have made it to 15 minutes! That is what I want us to be able to do each day so that everyone is practicing reading and also has something to write to me about in their reading response journals.

We also talked about schema this week and how that is using what we already know from past experiences. We created a schema chart as a class, and then each child filled in their own schema head. It was great to see what each child thought they knew a lot about!

In math we finished up our first chapter, which was a lot of review and gave me a lot of good information on how to sort out math groups. We did our first math test on Friday and the kids did wonderfully on it!