Off to a great start!

September 15, 2010 | Posted in: Class Updates

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We’re now in the third week of school, and I’m so proud of the great work the kids’ have done since the first day of school!

Our year began with several getting to know you activities including Two Lies and a Truth (on display on the kids’ lockers for open house), a Q&A time, and more.  I focus a lot on building a positive classroom community, and I think we’re off to a good start.

One of the most time-consuming parts of the start of a new school year is going over classroom routines.  By now, kids are familiar with the arrival and dismissal process, our homework policies, classroom management routines, etc.

Our first truly academic activity of the new school year was the start of our “Summer Item” writing activity.  Each student brought in an item that represented a memory from the summer.  This gave us the opportunity to discuss the difference between narrative (story) writing and expository (article) writing – the kids were given the choice of styles for their writing.  We started by planning out the who, what, when, where, why, and how of each student’s summer experience, and now the students are writing rough drafts of their summer item stories.  I’ve conferenced with a little over half the class so far, and I’m hoping to start final drafts within the next week.  My one-on-one conferencing with kids has given us a chance to practice independent work habits – something that sounds simple but is often challenging for students.

We started our reading series in the second “week” (all two days of it) and are now finishing our second story.  We are working on narrative elements (setting, characters, problem, solution, main events), prefixes and suffixes, and (tomorrow) types of sentences.  These are all skills you can review with your child at home during shared reading time, while watching TV, or when at the supermarket.  If you need ideas, I’m happy to help!

In math, we are in the middle of our first geometry unit.  Kids have learned about lines, line segments, rays, polygons, parallel and perpendicular figures, and more.  The kids have worked together for a variety of activities.

I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s open house, and to a successful school year in general!