Mrs. Cook's Classroom: January Flew By!

Hi Everyone!

Ever since we got back from Christmas break, school has been such a blur! The first couple of weeks back were absolutely exhausting... the kids were still in vacation mode and we had to really review our routines and procedures. It's like they completely forgot how to walk in a straight line, raise their hands when they want to speak, and sit criss cross on the rug. Fortunately, we got back into the swing of things by the end of January, haha.

Literacy and math assessments consumed weeks 3 and 4 of January. I believe that assessments are a necessary and immensely valuable tool to use in the classroom, but when 4 out of 7 school hours are dedicated to assessments... I feel like it's a bit overkill. I will be glad when the last DIBELS assessment is done next week.

On the bright side... we have gotten to do some neat things in the time that I am actually able to teach. My kiddos FINALLY got enough links on their "compliment chain" (so that it touched the floor) to have a celebration.

I hung our compliment chain above the SmartBoard after we had our celebration. It took 21 links for the chain to touch the floor. Way to go kiddos!

In our literacy and writing block, we have been focusing on how to correctly read and write punctuation. Our media specialist gave me the book Punctuation Celebration by Elsa Knight Bruno to share with my class and they just loved it. It is such a cute and very informative text! We have only read about periods, commas, question marks, exclamation marks, and apostrophes thus far, but I know that they are looking forward to learning about all of the other types of punctuation such as quotation marks and semi colons.

Such a cute book!

Additionally, we have been learning how to write letters. I feel like many students go throughout school without knowing how to properly write a letter, and so I wanted to share the very basics with my kiddos. After we co-wrote a letter to a student who moved to a different school a few weeks ago, I had the students to write their own letter to whomever they desired. Many wrote to family members and friends, but everyone did a great job!

Our practice letter that we wrote to our friend who moved away. The different colors represent the 5 parts of the letter: date, greeting, body, closing, and signature.

This month we have also been focusing a lot on how to read and write compound words. We have played some fun games in class that involved the students trying to match up a word they had on an index card to someone else's word to make a real compound word. There were some funny word mash-ups along the way! The learners practiced using their compound word creations by making a compound word "quilt." After folding a piece of paper in half twice, students wrote 4 compound words of their choice in each square, used them in sentences, and then illustrated their sentences.

The compound words she chose to use: outside, jellyfish, sandbox, and birthday. I thought the illustration of the jellyfish was especially cute!

During our writing time we have been really focusing on using "sparkle" words (adjectives) to enhance our writing. As a fun and wintry activity (even though the temperature is still in the high 60s), we completed an acrostic poem using the letters SNOW. We had a lot of fun coming up with ways to describe snow using those letters. We really had to think hard to come up with the O. I might have helped them out just a little bit... :)