What a busy week! We finally began benchmark and our days seem jam packed! As I keep telling the class we are still working out some kinks and I am playing with the schedule to make sure I can fit everything in the best way. We always begin our mornings with ELA and morning Montessori work times. This gives us a nice and peaceful start to each morning. I have them in groups now and their book bags will come home today! These will be switched out each Friday with leveled readers! My goal was by October so I am happy to start a coupe days before hand!

You will see lots of spelling activities they worked on in the mornings and benchmark writing this week. Our benchmark reproducible had short stories that taught us about the emperor penguin habitats and a short read called Postcards by Alex. We did lots of recall and exploring the texts. We examined new vocabulary, circled paragraphs, and picked out important information to make sure we new the key details from the stories. I will note—- some of the pages we changed the directions around a little to make it easier…. they were intimidated by doing these things independently at first but did AMAZING!!! I am SO PROUD of them!!! We will continue to build upon these skills throughout unit one in hopes that as we progress throughout the year they will become more independent with their comprehension and answering questions. That is a big part of the IReady and MSTEP testing.

Lots of questions are coming up about homework!

It begins NOW! 🙂

In todays folder you will see the “Spelling Choice Board”. You have one week to do FOUR ACTIVITIES from the front page. (**** You do NOT have to turn in the papers proving you did them.. you can just do them. I provided copies for this time only as an example. I will NOT be providing them each time. Think of this as your master copy or example. If you want to make copies you can. If you do not— then just have your child use a spiral notebook or plain piece of paper). YOU ONLY TURN IN THE TOP CHOICE BOARD PAPER EACH FRIDAY! Each week you will get a new choice board paper and the week flier with the new word list. Remember I will have all 10 spelling words and 5 high frequency words on the test the following Friday. I give this on Friday because I understand that kids have after school activities and plans. This way if you would like to do an activity or two over the weekend you may. Or if you want to do all six you also have the time. I require four to get full points on the report card grade.

Part two of homework:

READING BOOK BAGS 🙂 Your child should read 20 minutes nightly. They have 3 books at their level in the book bag. They can read to them selves or you. We are working on building our reading stamina as a class but I would love for them to build this at home also. If you would like additional work then some of these books have writing ideas in the back of them. They are a great resource.

I will not be sending home math homework at this time however- Math Iready pathways AND fluency flight on iready are great practice for them!

I hope you all have a great weekend!