Handwriting Without Tears

Children's handwriting matters.  It matters now, next year, and for years to come.  Handwriting skills affect school success (Feder and Majnemer 2007).  Handwriting is a skill that must be taught.  We teach it deliberately and systematically because we want children to write with good habits automatically.  This skills mastery frees children to focus on their content of their writing, instead of the mechanics.  Elementary students spend the majority of their day doing handwriting work, and good handwriting skills help students write with speed and ease in all their subjects.  The earlier children master this skill, the more likely they are to succeed in school.

IDR - Independent Daily Reading

Independent reading lets students practice strategies that they learned during the other instructional contexts along the gradual release of responsibility.  During independent reading, students read from texts at their independent reading level or texts that are easy enough for them to decode and understand without a lot of effort.  The goals of independent reading are to...

• practice a smoothly operating reading process
• to exercise choice  
• develop reading interests  

Independent reading that offers guided choice, that teaches children how to select books that are on an appropriate reading level for them, and during which teachers confer with students yields positive results.  It is critical to maintain the balance between student choice and text demands.  Independent reading is often referred to as reading practice, and the ways students interact with texts at this point in the gradual release of responsibility should echo those practiced in read-aloud, shared, and guided reading contexts.

Popsicle Treat

Hard work pays off!  

Enjoying a tasty, POPSICLE treat 

on the first day of school!! 

Gaga For Graphs

Graphing is a topic covered in our first grade curriculum, and is considered to be a high-quality mathematical concept for 4-6 year old children. Below are three important reasons to include graphing in early childhood classrooms.

• Teachers can enhance children’s interest in mathematics by creating graphs about familiar routines and classroom events.
• Teachers can emphasize the pervasiveness of graphs and mathematics in the world by integrating their use across subject fields such as science, visual arts, technology, engineering, social studies, and language arts.
• Graphing provides a meaningful opportunity for children to represent and communicate important mathematical relationships. Some of these relationships include equality, inequality (more/less), and the associative property in addition. This property, also referred to as a “grouping property,”states that a change in order in the grouping of three or more addends does not change the sum: a + (b + c) = (a + b) + c.

 Most importantly, graphs enable children to make their mathematical thinking visible.

Have You Filled A Bucket Today?

 The Theory of the Dipper and the Bucket

Each of us has an invisible bucket. It is constantly emptied or filled, depending on what others say or do to us. When our bucket is full, we feel great. When it's empty, we feel awful.  Each of us also has an invisible dipper. When we use that dipper to fill other people's buckets -- by saying or doing things to increase their positive emotions -- we also fill our own bucket. But when we use that dipper to dip from others' buckets -- by saying or doing things that decrease their positive emotions -- we diminish ourselves.

Like the cup that runneth over, a full bucket gives us a positive outlook and renewed energy. Every drop in that bucket makes us stronger and more optimistic.
But an empty bucket poisons our outlook, saps our energy, and undermines our will. That's why every time someone dips from our bucket, it hurts us.

So we face a choice every moment of every day: We can fill one another's buckets, or we can dip from them. It's an important choice -- one that profoundly influences our relationships, productivity, health, and happiness.

WE ARE ALL BUCKET FILLERS AT HOUGH STREET SCHOOL! 

Read Alouds

What are read alouds and what can they do for instruction?

A read aloud is a planned oral reading of a book or print excerpt, usually related to a theme or topic of study. The read aloud can be used to engage the student listener while developing background knowledge, increasing comprehension skills, and fostering critical thinking. A read aloud can be used to model the use of reading strategies that aid in comprehension.

Reading aloud good books can become a tradition and favorite activity in the classroom. (An excellent site for information on read alouds is located at: http://www.trelease-on-reading.com/rah.html) The Center for the Improvement of Early Reading Achievement (CIERA) maintains a library of articles about using read alouds for engagement and comprehension in their archives. http://www.google.com/u/ciera?q=read+alouds&domains=ciera.org&sitesearch=ciera.org

Benefits of using read alouds

One of the most important things adults can do in preparing children for success in school and in reading is to read aloud with them.

• Listeners build listening and comprehension skills through discussion during and after reading.
• Listeners increase their vocabulary foundation by hearing words in context.
• Listeners improve their memory and language skills as they hear a variety of writing styles and paraphrase their understanding.
• Listeners gain information about the world around them.
• Listeners develop individual interests in a broad variety of subjects and they develop imagination and creativity: what better way to build skills which foster inquiry?
• Other suggestions and benefits are in the Education World article at: http://www.education-world.com/a_curr/curr213.shtml.

Read alouds can be used to

• introduce lessons
• provide an introduction to new concepts and increase science vocabulary
• lower the abstract nature of science textbooks' explanations
• invite conversation and generate questions for discussion and investigations
• model scientific thinking
• provide content to support hands-on investigations
• model different problem-solving approaches to science that may support students in their own scientific investigations
• examine the colorful illustrations and photographs; they can tell a story beyond the words on the page

Reading and thinking out loud is the single most important thing you can do for your developing reader at home! We are all busy, so there are many online resources you can use to help you! No time to read tonight? Try http://www.storylineonline.net/ and allow your child to watch a member of the screen actors guild read their favorite book!

Cafeteria Expectations

Good Choices

1. Eat your lunch.

2. Sit on your bottom.

3. Stay in your seat.

4. Use your inside voice.

5. Clean up your messes.

   6. Raise your hand to ask for help.   
                           

 

Bad Choices

1. Play with your food.

2. Stand on the benches.

3. Run around the cafeteria.

4. Scream and yell across the table.

5. Make big messes.

Waiting In Line

Time To Eat

Reading Notes From MOM!!

So hungry!