Welcome to my new page!

Happy New Year Crew!

How are all of you?  I am so excited to see the children on Wednesday.  I have mixed rest with work and am ready to get started again.  I have some great exciting new things planned to help my crew grow as learners.

Highlights:

• Author Studies!  As a crew we have been studying author/illustrator Jan Brett. I will continue modeling how we can look at a writer's style with her books.  This study will kick off group author studies where "like readers"  will be paired up with an author.  I've gathered books from these authors:  Ezra Jack Keats, Kevin Henkes, Nancy Carlson, Dr. Seuss, Eric Carle, and Judith Viorst and Tedd Arnold.   Starting next week during centers, the children will have the opportunity to work together reading these authors books.  Then they will be marking them with sticky notes, writing their connections, comparisons/differences, wonderings and other thoughts in their spiral notebooks.  On our class I-pads they will have the opportunity to do google searches on these authors and add facts about the authors to the author folders I have created for them.  I think they are going to love this!
• Individual spelling word lists.  I have a "thing" about spelling.  Although we have been working on a set of words during centers, I want to add to this, giving each child a list of words to work on and then be tested on.  I'm thinking this crew can test each other along with Dana which frees me up to work on work work with the entire crew.  We will be learning multiple ways to spell words.  I've recently introduced er, ir, ur.   
• In expedition we will be looking at notable people and national symbols and holidays.
• Addition facts will be a strong focus as will place value in math.  Start practicing those facts.  There are lots of math games on-line, or some kids prefer the old fashioned flashcards, or both! Such an exciting time as we move forward into more complicated higher-level thinking story problems.

In writing we will continue our work on personal narratives.  The children should have gathered lots of new memories and experiences over the break so I expect a flurry of new stories coming out of them. 

Dana and I have lots of great pictures from our trip to the Chinese Cultural Center which I'll share with you this week. 
See you soon! 
Mary Beth