We had a full and busy week in LE! As mentioned last week, Morning Jobs became less free choice and exploration and more about pre-literacy and literacy exercises. The students felt the change and were very tired by the end of the week! Everyone is working so hard with the new expectations, still learning the transitions and routines, and there has been a great deal of new connections and friendships!

Morning Jobs

Vocabulary cards AND journal writing were taught for the first time, and the students showed a great deal of interest! We have a series of 3-part cards (1. picture & word cards 2. picture cards, and 3. word cards) in several interest areas… aircrafts, flowers, farm life, pond life, insects, and butterflies to name a few. The students need to be quite organized, finding strategies to arrange the cards in order, make matches, and read the names. Some of the card sets have 30+, which makes the job very challenging!!

Writer’s Workshop

The students kept progressing through the handwriting book, the “Book About Me”, and the “Class Book”. We are sending the “Class Book” with faces and names of all the students in LE home as soon as it is finished so that children can practice reading it and remembering everyone’s names. It is helpful for parents, too! A second year student, who had finished all her work, wrote a story and read it to her classmates! Everyone is very excited about starting to tell and write their own stories!

Math: Ms. Jen

This week we continued to explore the math shelves, work on our number formation, and accomplish big tasks like arranging all 100 tiles on the 100 board! In math we talk a lot about which strategies to use as each student thinks about problem-solving and computation in different ways. It has been a pleasure to see the students manipulating materials to make numbers in the thousands and to notice patterns.

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Math: Ms. Alaza

We started this week with the thought question of “how long would a number line be from the door to our outside lunch area?” After brainstorming, we all agreed with the estimation of 45. We then thought of ways to test it. We decided to use chalk and yardsticks and made our way outside to make our number line. We then jumped down our number line with both feet, on one foot, by 2’s and by 3’s. The next day the thought question asked “how many feet were from the door to the outside lunch area?” We knew we used 8 yard sticks from the door to the outside classroom to make our number line so we had to figure out how many feet were in a yard stick. We found this out by observing different types of rulers and lining them up to the yard stick. We then all used different calculations to come to 24 feet! 

After this students were divided into pairs to work in for the rest of the week. Students were introduced to new materials such as the stamp game and the small bead frame. Both materials are a hands-on activity that is accompanied by sets of cards that increase in difficulty and mathematical operations, starting with the addition of two 4-digit numbers without carrying. We continued using these materials for the rest of the week while working on our focus, cooperation, frustration levels and scribing of numbers on whiteboards with the correct place value. 

Book Clubs

We started two Book Clubs this week in which 4 to 6 students and one teacher work together reading a shared book, talking about the characters and plot, playing all kinds of word games, and doing projects. Fridays are for resting… the classroom was really peaceful this afternoon as we took a pause and relaxed around the classroom for a half an hour before Art!

Woodshop: Pictures from work with Mr. Josh!

Have a great weekend!!