Morning meetings give us a chance to build our community. Meetings will consist of greeting one another, sharing news with each other, if time allows, a fun activity to get our day started as a group of learners. This makes for a wonderful way to learn socialization skills among peer to peer; it follows a structure that allows students to master foundational skills, feel safe, and develop trust within our classroom community.

Closing Circle closes out our day by adding in a piece of community reflection that focuses on our learning, growth, and behavior. This is a time to reflect on what is going well, what we can do better, and goals for the following day/week.

Interactive read-aloud is a whole-group instructional context where students will think about, talk about, and respond to text that has been purposefully selected by the teacher. Both readers and listeners actively process the language, ideas, and meaning of the text together.

Watch & read here for further explanation: https://fpblog.fountasandpinnell.com/what-is-interactive-read-aloud 

During Reader's Workshop, students will work independently while I host small Reading Groups to meet with me. Students will build stamina during independent reading time, work on a weekly reading response letter that follows a guided checklist with a variety of ways they can accomplish this task, including possible enrichment opportunities and project-based learning linked to peer interactions.

During Writer's Workshop, we will utilize mentor texts to study author's craft. Students will explore various writing genres including narrative, informational, poetry and opinion writing. Your child will learn strategies for writing, how to use graphic organizers to plan out their pieces, the writing process, and meet with a teacher to support editing/conferencing about their writing throughout the year.  There will be opportunities for publishing writing and hosting celebrations of our work as a class community.

Your child will also be learning keyboarding skills through the program "Keyboarding Without Tears." 

Science and Social Studies units will be brought to life through our Focus Curriculum booklets. Assessments will take place at the end of each unit. I fully believe in hands-on investigations and will be eager to bring these units of study to life in our classroom.

Math will be taught in small groups following a daily mini-lesson from our Envision curriculum. While small groups are taking place, an independent group will have time to complete a checklist of math center tasks. We will engage in "math talk" discussions, video clips, supplemented math games, independent practice time, project-based learning and enrichment projects. 

The Developmental Spelling Assessment (DSA) is used to determine your child’s developmental spelling stage. Using the assessment data, children will be given spelling lists from words within our Fundations program, based upon their particular needs. Children will also have personal, high frequency words to study and learn. Fundations will be used this year to teach children sounds, their representative letters, and their combination into words, phrases, and sentences. Students will be learning to write in cursive this year!