Room 29 Monthly Updates

 

Here is a look at the skills we will be focusing on in September:

 

**Literacy**

            We will begin our introduction to Readers and Writers Workshops, where the routines and rituals of both workshops will be introduced and practiced.  Our first reading unit is called “Building Good Reading Habits.”  Some of the skills we will work on for Readers Workshop are building good reading habits by: previewing a text before reading, making predictions, reading to check predictions, thinking about the books we read, talking about the books we read, retelling stories, reading with a partner, reading more and more, practicing reading with fluency, tracking print with our eyes, reading in phrases (instead of word by word), and rereading books for meaning.  Our first writing unit is called “Small Moments” in which the focus will be writing “small moment” stories.  (For example, writing about a time he/she got across the monkey bars at the park, instead of writing about a whole entire day.)  Some of the skills we will work on for Writers Workshop are: generating small moment topics, planning before writing, using pictures to help add words to stories, revising our writing to include more details, sounding out words to record what we hear, and rereading our writing to edit it.  The children will be introduced to the writing process with the following steps:

  1. Think of an idea (something that happened already)
  2. Plan (touch and tell the story across the pages, then sketch each page)
  3. Write
  4. Revise
  5. Edit

In addition, we will begin Unit 1 in Fundations, our phonics program, with reviewing the letter names, keywords, sounds, and lower-case letter formations of the letters a-z.

    

**Math**

We will do the calendar as part of our daily routine, which includes the date, the days of the week, the months of the year, patterns, and counting the days using hundreds, tens, and ones.  Also, we will work on using pictures to “add to” and find sums, using concrete objects to solve “adding to” addition problems and “putting together” addition problems, and solving adding to and putting together situations using the strategy of “making a model.”  We will also understand and apply the Additive Identity Property for Addition (adding a number to 0) and the Commutative Property of Addition (adding in any order).  After that, we will model and record all the ways to put together numbers within 10 and build fluency for addition with 10.

 

**Science / Social Studies**

-Constitution Day

- Autumn / Fall

- Johnny Appleseed's Birthday

- Space Systems: Patterns and Cycles