Crew News January 17, 2012

Phonics
We did a Making Words phonics activity today. We used letter cards to create words and then sorted those words into categories and thought about how we could use what we learned to spell new words.  We wrote all of the words we created in our spiral notebook.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 5.10 Turn-Around Dice

Crew News January 9, 2012

Oh, Those Tricky Vowels
Vowels, vowels, vowels. Vowels can be so tricky to learn. As a first grade teacher I would love to be able to change the spelling of many words to make them fit more standard rules and patterns. Alas, I do not have that kind of power in this world. So, we are working on learning all we can about those tricky vowels. Earlier in the year we studied short vowel sounds. We recently started looking at various ways to spell long vowel sounds. Last week we looked at a few ways to spell the long "a" sound and today we looked at ways to spell the long "e" sound (see our charts below for examples). We will continue to work our way through all of the vowels and notice just how many different ways you can spell one sound. Tricky, tricky, but we can do hard things.

Library Book Donation
Peyton donated some books to our classroom library today. It is always fun for all of the crew to see "new to us" books. Thanks, Peyton.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 5.6 Relation Symbols

Crew News November 30, 2011

Phonics
During our phonics time we have been working on tricky letter combinations like sh, ch, th, wh, ph, kn, wr and qu. This week we began working on vowels and their various sounds and roles in words. Vowels are very tricky so we will be spending some time working with them.

Our Heights
Below is a graph of our heights in inches that we made yesterday. I wanted to share it with you because I have never had such a huge range of heights before. As you look at the graph, know that we measured to the nearest inch and I always rounded down (if rounding was necessary) because we will measure our heights again later in the year and everyone wants to see that they have grown - rounding down will give some of them a little boost later.

Homework
Reading ~ Read a good book or two.
Math ~ Home Link 4.8 Telling Time