A Successful Play!

The children did a fabulous job performing Jan Brett's play, The Gingerbread Baby.  They worked hard both at home and school to learn their lines, and it showed!  Thank you all for attending this special event.  Even though it was only ten minutes long, I know the children were excited to have such a full audience.

In addition to practicing our play during Reading Workshop, we also:

• learned that buddies can practice echo reading.  One chid reads, then his/her buddy rereads that same page.
• learned that buddies talk about books when they finish reading.  We can check to see if our buddy was listening and thinking as we were reading by asking: "What was my book about?".
• reviewed that readers get to know a book before reading it by doing a picture walk.  A picture walk can help us figure out the title.
• reviewed that when we are done reading, we think about what the whole book was about and tell the story/nonfiction text back to ourselves. 
• reviewed the names of the vowels and that each vowel can make a short and long sound.  We then learned a new strategy, Flippy Dolphin.  This strategy reminds us to flip the vowel sound in a word...if one sound doesn't work, then flip it and try the other vowel sound.

During Writing Workshop we spent time learning about different types of writing we might explore at the writing station.  We learned to write/make lists, cards, and letters.

We also took a day to decorate paper gingerbread men/women.

During Math we:

• explored combinations of numbers that make 5.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• learned about weight and used a pan balance to compare the weight of different sets of objects.
• learned why counting by tens is useful, then highlighted the multiples of ten on our growing number line and number grid.  We used this to help us notice patterns.
• played a gingerbread man counting game.

Next week promises to be a fun two days at school as we make gingerbread houses on Monday and have pajama day on Tuesday.  

Have a nice weekend!

Katie