Castles, word families and pumpkins!

Wow!  As I have been preparing for conferences I am blown away by the growth each and every child has made in our short time together!  From feeling confident to sounding out words and write independently to taking the risks of trying out new books or tackling harder ones, these kids are incredible!  We have grown so much as a class, too, by becoming more comfortable and graceful in our daily and weekly routines, being mindful of our friends needs during work time, sharing space with one another and knowing our weekly jobs.  There is such sweetness, love and care with each other and it just keeps growing and growing!  Yum! 

It has also been quite delicious meeting with each child and talking about how they want to grow in the areas of math, reading, writing, and personally.  I love the reflection and thought the children invest in creating goals that are important to them that empower them to really be involved in their learning and growth at school.  It is such a meaningful process and I look forward meeting with all of you this week!

Math
We have been lots of different math games to help us learn our math facts!  Some are working on their addition math facts and playing games like The Spiral Game or BINGO.  We are also learning different strategies to help us solve addition problems.  We are going over our doubles, getting those solid and then we will see how handy they are when figuring out other math problems.  Yay, for doubles!!

Others are doing a bit of algebra and playing Psychic Math to practice finding the missing addend.  Others are practicing adding ones and tens and playing Race to a Flat to begin the process of regrouping groups of ten (here we come carrying!).  Others are practicing adding BIG numbers and looking for number palindromes and seeing how many times they need to add a number before they get one.  Some take 8 steps!  For example, take 21.  Add the reverse 12 and we get 33 - a palindrome that took one step.  Some are also working on there multiplication math facts and playing games to help them learn those facts.

Literacy
We are expert word sorters!  We have begun our wall of word families to record the spelling patterns we have visited.  There are several groups happening in our class. Some continue with their baby vowels, others are playing with magic e (time for the babies to say their grown up name!), and others are going over crazy "r" (er, ir, ar). 

In Writing Workshop, there are so many stories happening!  Some kids have been inspired by our theme to write stories of castles, princesses and queens.  Others are writing about Halloween and jack-o-lanterns.  And some are writing stories about owls, angry birds, or giants.  We have begun our wall of helpful words that kids can pull off, bring to their seat and use in their writing. These words related to our theme or the season and there are a few sentence starters, too.  So handy when we have a tricky word that we plan to write many times throughout our story.  Author's chair is a favorite time at the end of Writing Workshop.  We are taking turns having an opportunity to choose a recent book we have written and read it to the class.  So exciting!!

In reading workshop, we continue to be strong, dedicated readers.  We are learning strategies to help our comprehension.  Wolfie (our stuffed little wolf that likes to help during Reading Workshop) share with us out so retell a story.  After he taught us how to do it, he then got to visit kids who finished a book and were ready to retell their story.  Wow, I don't know who love it more, me (I mean Wolfie) or the kids - there was such excitement to read and retell.  Thanks Wolfie for all your help and inspiration!

Theme
Castles!  Kings and Queens!  Peasants!  We have spent our time in the Middle Ages exploring castles  and asking ourselves questions.  Why did they build them? Why did they stop building them? What are the different parts? Who built them? How did they live in them? Who lived in them?  How long did it take to build? We have REALLY enjoyed learning how to draw castles.  Please keep your eye out for these careful drawings (there is some amazing brickwork!).

We also learned that you really didn't get to choose what you wanted to do during the Middle Ages.  We learned about the feudal system and some of the different work people did.  We did have fun pretending to choose the job we would like!

And I can't forget the clothing!  We learned about the different clothes worn depending on who you were.  We were tickled by the idea of how much royalty loved to wear color - often the right side of their clothing would be one color and the left side a different color.  Their shoes, too!  We had fun coloring and designing their outfit on paper dolls.

Field Trip
Oh, the pumpkin patch! 

Also, follow these links to Jen's updates on the building or our time machine and digging potatoes for the food bank!