Busy, Busy Week

Three day weekends are great, but four day work weeks are hectic. We still have 5 days of work to do in 4.
You are going to start seeing a lot of papers like the one below. I want to let you know what you are seeing and how to talk to your child about it. This is what we do for writing. I tell the children that they are authors and illustrators. Almost every day they will have the opportunity to write. We talk about how to get ideas for writing. This week we were using books to help us with ideas. I would read a story to them and they would write about their favorite part. When we write, I tell the kids to THINK, DRAW, WRITE. They think of an idea first, draw a picture of the idea, and then write about it. Right now, I am teaching them to label their drawings. I do not tell the children how to spell a word. I'm teaching them to listen to the sounds they hear in words and write what they hear. I the drawing above, the child wrote "shopping". You can see how he was listening to the sounds and writing what he heard.

In this drawing, the child did more labeling. When you see papers like this, ask your child to read it to you. You can ask about the sounds they heard. Please don't talk about "correct" spelling yet. I don't want the kids to become fearful of writing because they think they aren't doing it right. Correct spelling will come later. Enjoy your child's attempts and treasure them because this stage doesn't last long.

It's fun to watch the kids make new friends and learn to get along.

This is octopus. (You were probably wondering.) Every week we will make a craft that goes with our letter of the week. So far, we have learned the letters L, O, G.

We also read our first word this week - log. They were excited to read a word. We will keep adding to our words every week. Soon I will have class full of readers and writers.