Highlights from a True Autumn Week

Hello families,

This week in readers workshop we used a new tool to "sign up" for our reading choices and practiced switching between choices more quickly and quietly. Students continued to meet with me to check their sight word knowledge. Sight words are commonly used words that don't always follow traditional spelling/reading rules (i.e. what, was, am). Knowing these words on sight helps students spend less energy decoding these common words so they can focus their brain power on decodable words (i.e. cat, spell, name). Some students also did 1:1 reading with me using the Fountas and Pinnell reading assessments to check on their current levels for reading accurately with comprehension. I will continue this next week.

In math this week our big focus was on story problems. Last week we did some visual story problems together. This week we learned how to read story problems to get the information we need to solve it. Then we made clear representations of our thinking and wrote equations to match.

On Monday we had a special guest reader at JFK, Bill Jameson, so we went to the library to hear him read one of his books! We also read a bunch of books in our classroom: Pete the Cat: I Love My White Shoes, Pete the Cat: Rockin' In My School Shoes, Pete the Cat and the Magic Sunglasses, and The School Book. To go along with our read alouds we wrote a book about what we do at our school.

This week we began to practice meeting with different teachers during our WIN time. WIN is "What I Need." It's a time for students to get more practice with a skill they are developing or receive enrichment in an area where they are consistently demonstrating skills above grade level. During WIN students will work in differentiated groups with any of the first grade teachers, our ELL teachers Ms. Sarah and Ms. L, our reading interventionist Mrs. Weimer, or our math interventionist Mrs. Thomas. This week we practiced moving as a whole class into one of the other first grade rooms to meet another teacher and get used to switching spaces.

We had a great pajama day/toy day celebration on Thursday!

I will be out on Monday but will return on Tuesday! Have a great weekend!

Dates to Remember:

• October 16 - PTO Meeting
• October 18 - All School Morning Meeting 8:15-8:45
• October 24 - Picture Retake Day
• October 24 & 25 - Early Dismissal 11:00 (activities available with prior sign-up)

Have a great weekend!

❤ Mrs. Fox