Happy Friday!

Teaching students voracious reading is one strategy I really have loved teaching and find very valuable. This strategy fits under Fluency and Expanding Vocabulary on the CAFE menu. I consider myself a voracious reader as an adult, and I love to guide these students towards their own love for reading.

Reading, reading, and more reading will help students gain word knowledge for their daily lives and for their writing. As a teacher, it is important for me to help my students learn at a young age the importance of reading. Voracious reading involves having many options for students to read, giving reading time every single day, reading to students every day, and modeling what it means to be a voracious reader. If I can surround students with my own love for reading, then hopefully this will help develop their own love for reading.

You will be aware of the strategies I introduce each week so that you can help your child at home with their reading as well. Knowing that you love to read and you love to help them read will help these children because the voracious readers we hope for!

In math, the children have been busy getting ready for their unit 1 progress check! It was a big today for all of them, because for some, it was their first time taking a formal test. We have been learning about counting by 2's and 5's, using tally marks to represent numbers and data, naming numbers that come before and after a given number, and counting forward and backwards on a number line to solve number stories and number line problems.

The children are well on their way making a model of what a desired habitat would look like for a frog. The children are learning that all living things have basic needs in order to survive, and that living things get the energy they require to respond, grow, and reproduce from their environment. Here are a very pictures of the children planning and creating their models:

Picture on left: Aaliyah matches her design of a tadpole to a picture she found in a book.
Picture on right: J'Lyn putting her discovery post-it note on the wonder/discovery board! She discovered the different predators of a frog.

21st Century Skills: Something that I have really been trying to embed into the children's way of life is their ability of self-direction, having them set goals related to their learning and planning for the achievement of those goals. It is really important for children at this age to have something to reach for, whether it be as simple as remembering to put their name on their papers or putting punctuation at the end of sentences. This was important to me in kindergarten, and the children are beginning to become aware of the importance as well. Just ask them what their goals are in school and they will be able to tell you. Goal-setting would be great to talk about in the car or sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's. Setting goals and being aware of what it takes to achieve those goals is not just for adults. Even our little ones can benefit from the confidence-boost that comes from setting a goal, working towards it, and achieving it.

Quotes of the week: Kaydence telling me that she would "break into her piggy bank" to help pay for the new house her parents are trying to design, and Jordan saying "I don't want you to have to do all the work, Miss Leslie!" as he washed play-doh tools without even being asked.

Here is a video for you to enjoy. It is a video of all the first graders in gym class with Mrs. Graves. They are our "dynamic dribblers!"