Storyline:
As you know the whole school has been given a new challenge. Students in each classroom are becoming experts on a National Park. Our park is Biscayne National Park. This week we have been busy creating our frieze. It is coming along quite well. We have some more work to do and hope to have the setting complete by Thursday. We also had Craig Letz come to visit the first grade students. He has worked for several national parks. He talked to the children about what Park Rangers do, what they wear, what types of jobs there are in parks and a variety of other topics. Next week we will be working on our characters. For those of you who are new to Storyline, this is a really fun component to this teaching method. Each child will become a "character" in our national park story. This will include filling out a biography, making up a new name (which they will be called during storyline time) and creating a self-portrait of their character. Please talk with your children about some fun names to pick. My name is going to be Ranger Coral.
On Thursday, the third homefun assignment was sent home with the kiddos. They are to begin the process of becoming Junior Park Web Rangers. They can use their new storyline names when for their login names. Please help your child complete the homefun assignment.
Later this week or early next week, I will be sending out a volunteer request for parents to come into the classroom to help with a mini ranger convention we are going to have in class.
Math: This week in math we reviewed time, money, frames and arrows. Measuring and temperature was introduced to the kiddos.
Writing: We are writing three to four days a week. We continue to work on extending our stories and adding adjectives to our nouns, using upper case letters when appropriate and using punctuation. New this week was beginning our Daily Oral Language. Each morning the children work on writing and oral language skills.
Reading: Currently there are 5 different reading groups in the class. Each group is working on areas that pertain to their current ability. We are also working our our Cafe Menu. We have added some more strategies. Under comprehension, we added Back Up a Re-read. We added a new item on our menu. Fluency, "I can read smoothly and with understanding. The strategy that we have discussed for fluency is the importance of re-reading text more that one time. We have added "reading with voice" or intonation. Fluency helps us read more accurately and allows us to comprehend what we are reading.
Homefun:
Web Ranger and Reading 10 to 15 minutes each day.
I hope you all have a relaxing three day weekend.
See you on Tuesday.
Becky
