Phonics - This week we learned two more glued sounds.  We now have all, am, and an.  We made some cute "houses" this week.  They were the -am house and the -an house.  We wrote down words that could live in each house.  (jam, ham, Sam, ran, fan, man, etc.)  There were some close words - we had them live in tricky neighbor houses.  The kids loved it!  :)

Reading - Each day we continue to meet in our reading groups and work in our daily 5 centers.  This time has become absolutely amazing to watch and see the growth!  The students are working in Thanksgiving themed centers this week.  One choice is to make words out of the letters in Thanksgiving!  This has become a favorite!  Samuel came up with 45 word today out of the letters!

Another favorite is putting the words of a Thanksgiving poem / story in the correct order.  The words are written on the cover of the brown envelope.  All of the words are written on note cards.  The students need to put all the words in the correct order.

Guadalupe had to match the words on the feathers to the correct word family.

Johanna was using  this Thanksgiving poem to figure out which words were missing on her sheet.  Then she had to record the missing words.

Valeria was using wikki sticks to practice her spelling words.

Mason drew a picture out of this squiggle and wrote about it.  He made a snail.

Alex created a picture using hand art and wrote about it.  He made a jelly fish after reading a story about sea animals in his reading group.

Writing - This week in handwriting we are working on the letters Gg and Jj.  We are always focusing on forming the letters the correct way and putting them in the correct spaces.  In writing this week our writer's workshop story was about our favorite season.  We are working on starting with capital letters (and for some students - only using capital letters where they are needed), using punctuation, and using good spacing.  We continue to talk about adding more sentences and adding more details.  We also finished up our turkeys this week - and we have a few students that are working on their thankful turkeys.  Students are also creating hand art turkeys and writing things that they are thankful for.  

Math - Group 1 is working on adding numbers up to ten using counters and a number line.  They are starting to work on subtracting up to 5.

Group 2 finished the chapter on story problems yesterday.  They learned how to look at the story problem and decide if it was adding or subtracting, and how to figure out which number was missing.  They are now starting a unit on working with groups of tens and ones.  Today we learned that adding 3 + 1 is similar to adding 30 + 10.  We made groups of ten up to 100.

Suzi was really excited about making this lion out of pattern blocks in math centers.  :)

Religion - We are finishing up our chapter about Baptism in our book.  Friday we will read out of our Promise Paper to learn about this week's Gospel.

We love when we get to start the day with morning tubs!

Canned Food Drive - The students are encouraged to bring in cans of food.  We have a basket outside of our classroom door.  We will bring our canned goods to the All School Mass next week Wednesday.