Happy National Talk Like a Pirate Day!

Aaargh!  Ahoy Me Hearties!  The Buccaneers of Room 118 had a blast today celebrating National Talk Like A Pirate Day!  It's officially tomorrow but I couldn't let that day slip by without incorporating it into our learning time together.  I will let them tell you more about this in the captions below each picture.

Here are highlights of learning from our week!

Handwriting - I can already see an improvement in all of the children's handwriting.  I am formally teaching the formation of each letter.  I've also told the children that we never start any of our letters from the bottom line.  This week we worked on the letters /w/ and /t/.  

Shared Reading - As we sing songs each morning, we are engaging in shared reading.  The children love learning new songs each week that we also use for word study to find parts of words we know.  When we have a long weekend, I will be allowing the children to bring their poetry/songbooks home to share with you but will need them returned when we come back to school.

Writer's Workshop - We have finally begun this time everyday and the children are already taking ownership of this time in a big way!  I've set up the expectations for this time and they are being very responsible about their choices.  After my mini-lesson, the children are given some time to share with a friend what they've been writing about or they can get suggestions or help with words from a friend.  After about five minutes of sharing, I put on classical music which we've learned helps to get our creative juices flowing as we write.  

Science - I shared with the children that I had some questions about skunks and asked them if they'd help me to research this mammal.  The children will be bringing home a project to show what they've learned about skunks.  By studying this together, my hope is that they will also choose something they are interested in knowing more about to study on their own during our "Imagination Station" time each Friday.  This will be a self-guided time based upon each of their interests.  We will continue to review the six habits of thinkers (I shared this during Curriculum Night) to guide us as we study what we're interested in.


Math - Math Workshop is now underway.  I've already posted in Progress Book about how your child did on the first assessment which was a PRE-ASSESSMENT for all.  Based upon this pre-assessment about addition, I've planned activities for the children to do to either extend their thinking or to give them more time and experience working with me to better understand this concept.

Reader's Workshop is also up and running.  This week we talked about the three ways that a reader can read a book.  Ask your child to share these three ways with you.  We also talked about what their needs are to do their best reading.  Take a look at the poster to see what they told me they needed:).  

Upcoming Important Dates:
Monday, September 21st - Book Orders will be submitted
Tuesday, September 22nd - MAP testing
September 30th - Our first reading log will be coming home to record minutes your child reads to you and/or you read to your child in the month of October. 

Related Arts Schedule:
Monday - P.E.  (remember tennis shoes)
Tuesday - Art
Wednesday - Music
Thursday - Library
Friday - P.E.

This is Pirate Day.  We wore pirate things.  Some of us wore pirate hats.  

Pirates have a flag with bones and a skull and it is called the Jolly Roger.  Pirates would only attack one ship at a time.  We learned to talk like pirates.  Aargh means hello.  Aargh mateys means hello friends.  

The pirates believed that  having a girl on the ship was bad luck.  They wore an eye patch to see in the dark.  They have it on the entire day and when it is night time they would uncover it and then they could see in the dark right away.  They thought that having their ears pierced would help them to see better.  They thought that whistling on the ship would bring a storm.

We wrote down number sentences for 20 and under.  We worked on different numbers and the different ways to help other people with different ways to make that number.

We were writing as many number sentences as the number was.  If the number was 18 then there were 18 ways to write number sentences.  The way that we knew that was to draw a line under the first number of each number sentence.

We got pirate names.  Girls picked three even numbers and the boys picked three odd numbers.  The names were really funny!