Fall Celebration

I know you all have been wondering what in the world did they need clay pots for?!? Well, hopefully by this evening your child will come home with his/her intact. LOL! We made candy corn jack-o-lanturn pots to hold in all our goodies. I appreciate all the parents who came to help pass out the food and candy today. You really made it alot easier on me! ;) The students behaved very well, and we enjoyed eating up some treats while we listened to Jerry Seinfield read his book Halloween to us. It was a wonderful celebration! Don't worry, they didn't eat all their candy and hopefully shouldn't be too overdosed with sugar when they come home today!! LOL!! Happy Harvest and Halloween to you all! :)

Class Blaze Buck Reward

We had such a busy week, but the students had earned their 15 blaze bucks so I definitely wanted them to be able to cash them in for their reward. Mr. Watchinski came down today and gave the whole class Klondike bars and we had a great time enjoying them in the beautiful fall weather outside. I am so proud of them and we are working hard to earn our next 15 blaze bucks!!!

Mystery Reader # 1 - Dr. Anneaux

We were so thrilled to welcome Dr. Bruce Anneaux to our class this week as our very first mystery reader. Keller was completely surprised which was the goal of course!! :) Dr. Anneaux came up with some very good and challenging clues too! He read, It's the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown to the class, and we even were able to get a silly picture with him. Be on the look out for another mystery reader coming soon! ;)

Pantasia

We enjoyed our visit from the Pantasia Steel Band who performed "Music of the Caribbean" for our school. Their director, Kimberly Roberts, is a SC Artist-in-residence and children's book author. On October 26th, our class will meet with Mrs. Roberts for her program, "The South Carolina-Barbados Connection." These special sessions go hand in hand with our school-wide study of islands this year so we were very excited to have them come! Students can pre-purchase the book, Jammin' Geography-Caribbean Cruise. Flyers were sent home last week. Students should get their order sheets back to the media center with their money by Oct. 25th if you would like to purchase. Check out this neat video of one of the songs they performed. :)

Pizza Party Fun thanks to our PTO!!

I am so proud of my whole class! We celebrated our class winning the PTO membership party on Thursday. The students loved eating their pizza and popsicles! We also want to say thank you to Mrs. Anneaux and Mrs. Belec for their help setting up and cleaning up. It was delicious!:)

Rolling Reader

We are so happy that Mrs. Eberflus will be our Rolling Reader this year. Each week she will come and read to our class, and we are so excited about all of our upcoming visits this year. :)

"CAFE" Menu

We learned this week that as different readers, we need different instruction and support to help us become more independent and self-reflective in our work. CAFE is an acronym for: Comprehension(C), Accuracy (A), Fluency(F), and Expand Vocabulary (E). We reviewed and learned several strategies that will help us become proficient readers. Some of the strategies currently up on the board are "Do I remember what I read","Make a picture", "Making connections", "Asking ?'s", "Do I have a schema about this book", "Summarizing", "Cross-checking", "Flip the Sound", "Back up and reread", and "Tune into interesting words."

Counting Up with Subtraction

We learned a new way to count up with subtracting numbers this week. This website http://nlvm.usu.edu/en/nav/frames_asid_155_g_2_t_1.html
helped us practice understanding how to borrow from our next door neighbor with numbers. The students LOVED being able to use the pointer to move the numbers on the smartboard. :)