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This week brought changes that will now be routine. We began our Reading Street series, which entails a WHOLE LOT! Monday is the busiest day, which is why I choose to not do centers on Mondays. I really want to concentrate on introducing and extending our new skills for the week. Each Monday, after journals and calendar, we have a read aloud, learn a new phonics skill, practice our new spelling words, learn a new grammar skill, practice our listening comprehension, read our new story, and answer questions about the story (all before recess!). The rest of the mornings during the week, we practice our phonics, spelling, grammar, and comprehension skills. We also have centers. During centers I meet with my small reading groups. I just love to meet with these small groups because it really gives me a chance to get to know each student better!

This week in math we learned more about addition. Students were introduced to the addition and equals symbols. We practiced writing addition sentences, using fun manipulatives. One day I gave each student two dot cubes (or dice) and they rolled one at a time to fill in the blanks in the number sentences. Mr. Scott came in and observed another lesson, during which we used tokens to solve story word problems. He was very impressed at how each student was actively engaged in the lesson. They were listening and raising their hands so excitedly, but they were not yelling out answers, which impressed Mr. Scott the most. I love math. It's probably my favorite subject, and I want my 1st graders to love it too! I try to always make math hands on and fun. And, I have some more candy this week for edible math! The class will be beside themselves!

Our unit time was devoted to Nursery Rhymes this week. It is so fun to learn new skills while singing Nursery Rhymes. For instance, after singing Humpty Dumpty, we glued the rhyme into our Poetry Notebooks, and discussed the /all/ sound. We then brainstormed and wrote words with the /all/ sound. We also made a cute sheep after singing Mary Had a Little Lamb, Baa Baa Black Sheep, and Little Bo Peep. We even watched a video on the computer about how and why sheep are sheared.