A Peek at our Week!

This week started out with our second visit to the STEAM Lab! We learned how to use a new app called "Go" to drive Dash around like a remote control. We practiced using small movements to get Dash to "park" on a circle and to stay within his designated path of pool noodles. Visiting the STEAM Lab every other week is such a treat and the kids are having a blast. Thank you to Grandma Susie (Carter's Nonna) for helping out in the lab this week! We will visit the STEAM lab every other Tuesday from 8:30-9:20 - sign up on our Lotsa Helping Hands website to learn and explore with us! (No coding or robotics experience required!) ;)  

On Wednesday, Blackie's Pasture hosted 700+ RUSD runners! We had a great turnout from our room 4 kiddos and parents and I LOVED seeing our Reed community come together for such a great event. Thank you to all of the parents who helped organize the event, cheer on our littlest runners, and to those of you who even ran the course with us! Everyone had a blast and hope to see you all back again at our Run for Reed event next year!

Even though Apple Week has come and gone, we had a few leftover apple activities to finish up this week. On Monday we had our Great Apple Taste Test. We tasted red, yellow, and green apples, and then we chose our favorite one. We graphed our class results and talked about more, most, and least. The faces the kids made when they tried the Granny Smith apple were priceless! 

We also measured how many apples tall we were this week! Mrs. Masino helped measure us and then compare to find out who we were taller than and who we were shorter ​than. 

Even though Mrs. Caldwell is off to Bel Aire for the next 6 weeks, art is still alive and well at Reed School! This week in art we learned about mixing primary colors. We read Mouse Paint and then used red and yellow to make different shades of orange. The students learned that if they wanted a darker orange, they needed to ask for more red and if they wanted a lighter shade of orange, they needed to add more yellow. We painted with q-tips and with our fingers and hands to make giant orange circles. Later in the week we turned our paintings into pumpkins with feelings! :) 

We are hard at work in the mornings during our stations. Small group work in stations allows me to work with groups of students on specific skills. Some students are working on letters and letter sounds, some groups are working on beginning and ending sounds, and other students are working on sounding out CVC (consonant, vowel, consonant) words. While Mrs. Masino and I work with our groups, the rest of the students are completing independent games, activities, iPad work, etc. Here is a video of one of our favorite games - roll and race to the top!

We have also been learning 1-2 sight words a week and we are working on reading with 1:1 correspondence. This means the students are pointing to each word as they read. While they are reading they are: 
- Looking for sight words they know
- Looking at the first letter to make sure the beginning sound makes sense
- Using their "Eagle Eye" to look at the pictures for clues to decode unknown words

I absolutely love teaching early literacy. I am extremely passionate about beginning reading and writing instruction and I love seeing how proud the students are of themselves when they start to read and write. In the next couple of weeks, your child will start bringing home their book bags. The books and book bags should "live" in their totes. They should practice reading their books every night at home, but please help them remember to put the books back in the book bag and bring their beloved book bag back to school every day! The journey has begun and I look forward to working together with you to ensure that each child enjoys the ride to reading and writing success!

Last, but certainly not least, here is a glimpse into our math instruction last week. We are working on building number sense, or fluidity and flexibility with numbers, by learning how to decompose numbers and find their hidden partners. If that last sentence made very little sense, just watch this mathematician in action as she decomposes the number 5 into the hidden partners of 1 and 4 using a game called "How Many Bears in the Cave?" 

That's a wrap for our week - check back next weekend for photos from our Tiburon Fire Station field trip. Enjoy the rest of your weekend! - Mrs. Bowe