I was away at an all day math meeting yesterday, and it was so nice to be back in the classroom today!  There is nothing like sitting for most of the day to make me appreciate the bustle of the classroom.  We spent some time playing a new math game called bump today.  While we practiced adding two dice together, but more importantly worked on being good partners and good sports.  We also did some snowman problem solving and began a snowman project based on the book Snowballs by Lois Ehlert.

This afternoon while we were partner reading using books from our classroom library, using sticky notes to mark pages that we wanted to share because they were funny, exciting, or interesting in some other way.  A pair of partners approached me breathless with excitement.  They had marked a page because they could read the words in this book that was a "real" book (rather than one of the little leveled books that we use to practice reading words).  Their excitement was contagious as they shared the page and read it together to the class, and this led us to a discussion of the pay off for all of the hard work we do, learning sight words, using our fingers to point to words, getting our mouths ready with beginning sounds, and making sure we practice reading in some capacity every day- we are all really learning to read!