A special thanks to those who joined us on our field trip to Freedom Park on Friday. It was a successful (and exhausting!) trip and I truly appreciate your help!

This week:

Wednesday (9.30.09) – Beauty and the Beast at ImaginOn: Some seats opened up at the Wednesday showing of Beauty and the Beast. The show begins at 10:00 and we will take the 8:53am bus. If you’d like to join us, please let me know as soon as possible as there are limited seats.

Wednesday (9.30.09) – 1:00-2:00 Ms. Lanning could use volunteers to supervise the playground while she does Physical Fitness assessments. Please contact me or Ms. Lanning (klanning@commchart.org) if you can help out.

All week - I finally have all of our cereal boxes, but now they need to be cut down. If you would like to volunteer your time outside the classroom, this would be an easy project to take home. If you would like to take some, or all, of the boxes home to cut, let me know!

Any homework sent home on Monday should be returned on Friday.

Following is an article concerning the importance of play in the elementary school classroom. Most days we have time scheduled into our day for unstructured, free play. I believe a teacher's role is to not to control the children, rather, to teach self-control. As addressed in this article, studies show that play is crucial in developing these life skills. Check it out!

Hi everyone! We are certainly trucking along as we head into our sixth (already!) week of school.

We're working hard on understanding limitations in an environment that allows for much more choice than many children are used to. This can be a difficult transition for some students. For these reasons, you will notice that we've added assigned seating both on the carpet and at tables. The squares and names on the carpet are there to give the children a concrete visual of where their personal space is and where their body should stay during that time. There are many times during the day that students have a choice as to which table they will sit at (centers, math, etc.) but during Writer's/Reader's Workshop, students now sit at a table with their name on it. We have also implemented some new restroom procedures to help ensure more order during this time.

We are still sorting/classifying in Math. We're moving toward patterning (creating patterns, reproducing patterns, etc.) as well as the concept of number (counting, comparing and writing numbers, creating sets of numbers, etc.). In Science, we've gotten into the concept of weather and will continue to study more about what weather is and how it effects our environment. In Writer's Workshop, we've been working on writing true stories. We sure do have some excellent story tellers! These stories have opened up nice opportunities to discuss family, environments and neighborhood which ties directly in with our Social Studies objectives. Some students will be bringing home a Math Their Way sheet to work on during the week at home, as well as a spelling contract. Both should be returned on Friday.

This Friday, we will be traveling to Freedom Park for our second session with Staci Clark from the Reedy Creek Nature Preserve. All classes will be going and the time for our session is TBA. I will be updating the blog and sending a note home as soon as I am notified of the time we will be going. There is certainly power (and safety!) in numbers so if you're available to travel by city bus to the park with us on Friday, please let me know! Again, I will let you know the specific times as soon as I find them out myself!

As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns!