Our Beautiful Class!

What an amazing first two weeks of school!  It has been pure joy getting to know this sweet group of kiddos and creating community together.  We have been busy creating our class/school agreements, practicing how we like to communicate with each other and feeling out how we will work together as a group.  Here's what we have been up to at a glance (OK, maybe not a quick glance this time!  I promise a quicker one next time!):

Math: Addition games!  Reviewing and learning our math facts of 1-10 or 1-20.  Also, reviewing how we play math games so we can all learn our best by taming our dice and keeping voices low.  We are learning how to make choices that suit us as learners and help us grow our math brains.

Language: Writing Workshop and Literacy Centers!  Everyone was eager with stories ready to put onto paper in Writing Workshop.  We all like a quiet workshop to help us sound out our words, so we are working on creating this quiet space.  We started our Word Wall with our first word "are" so ask your child how to spell it!  We have been practicing going to Literacy Centers, managing our time at each one, and staying focused.  They are all doing amazing! We are ready for the real deal next week!  In handwriting, we reviewed our upper case letters and will begin our lower case letters next week.  Magic C will finally make an appearance (everyone is so anxious for her to come out and thinks she sleeps way too much!).

Afternoons: We spent this last week focusing on peace for International Day of Peace.  We read books about peace and thought about how we can help bring peace to our school, family, and community.  We also explored mandalas a bit and learning how there are mandalas all around us...a birds nest, a snow crystal, our eyes....we then created our own peace mandalas.  Look for these peaceful creations on our wall soon!  We will work more with peace next week by practicing peaceful communication (giraffe talk) and our solution wheel.  In P.E., we have been enjoying connecting with the older class and playing group games in the gym and outside. 

Reading Workshop:  We are practicing how to find a quiet spot, choosing books that we can read and help us grow as readers, and raising a hand when needing help. We are building up our reading time everyday!

Jobs:  Everyone is so amazing with their weekly jobs!  It warms my heart to watch the kids take care of our classroom in such a sweet, thoughtful, and caring way. 

Friday Workshop:  I love how eager the kids were to jump right in and teach a workshop on the very first Friday of school.  Thank you for teaching us how to make egg carton caterpillars, gak, and dressing up and acting out stories!

  

 I feel so grateful to get to spend the day with your children, to be their teacher, to learn from them, and to be a part of their lives.  Thank you for a wonderful start to a new school year!