At the End of Our First Quarter

It has been truly my goal to post here much more regularly and I do have so much to tell. Our days are busy and we are learning so much! We are doing something from the moment we enter until we leave. It is hard to believe we have come to the end of our first quarter already. It is time to tell you where we have been....and even more exciting where we are headed!

Our routines, centers and schedule is running fairly smooth at this time. Bumps come and they always will. However, when students hear the music play, they know what to do and where to go.

We start every day practicing the Reader's Theater. Students are assigned a group or partner and go to meet with them when they walk through the door. We have done scripts and poetry. Many went out to perform for the principal! They are reading with expression, speaking out loud and clear, reading at a perfect speed and using the right phrasing. They know this takes practice.

After the morning show we have our morning meeting. Then we do some brain exercises to prepare for the day. We do some work on white boards for phonics and discover new ideas and words in vocabulary work. Our center time is full of many special things, even inferring about photos. We act like detectives and use the clues.

One of our favorite times is Reader's Workshop. We have met several critters to help us and we are all becoming readers in the room. Real readers! Real readers figure out the words AND think about them too.

After lunch we work on our writing.

We are working on the trait of ideas. In Science we have learned about properties and force and motion.

Math time has been tough! We learned numbers up to 120, putting them in order, working with the chart, counting by tens, understanding tens and ones and greater than and less than. We arose to the challenge! We will practice these skills all year long!

See how busy we have been!!

So what's coming? Exciting things. We have been practicing a lot with blogging,

 tweeting and skype. Now we are going to connect with classrooms all around the world! We had the chance to do that a little during the celebration of International Dot Day! We read the book, The Dot by Peter Reynolds.

We Skyped with two classes, one in Texas and another in Wisconsin. We blogged about it....and guess what happened? Peter Reynolds, the author, commented on our blogs. It was amazing!

So, we are excited to study more books he wrote. We will be a part of #GRA (Global Read Aloud) for the next six weeks. We have many cool things planned. We will tell you more about them as we do them.

We are also joining up with Primary Blogging and will learn more about reading and commenting on other's writing. This will be another experience to help us grow as digital citizens!

So...stay tuned and watch us continue to learn and grow. Every day is exciting!