What an amazing group of children in our class this year!  I am astounded at how quickly they are learning all of the expectations and routines even as new ones are added each day.  We are making our way through artifact bags, using this opportunity to really practice being good listeners to see how much we can learn about each classmate.  After a classmate shares we are practicing asking questions to find out more, or just stating something we learned from the share.  About half of the children in the class have shared and I would love to have everyone share by the end of the week-if your child hasn't gathered items for his or her bag yet please help them with this soon.

We began writer's workshop today by writing about one thing we did this weekend.  Because most of us can't yet write words, we talked about using a picture to tell the story,  then adding pretend words, or letters we know, or maybe even beginning sounds to label parts of our pictures. As children are writing Susan Laskaris, who is with us each morning, and I had individual children tell us about their pictures while we wrote the words for them.

Today we also introduced several monarch caterpillars to our classroom.  These amazing creatures will be a main focus of our first science unit, which focuses on sorting and classifying plants and animals and the differences between living and non-living things.  We had a really nice discussion about how we need to care for these caterpillars while they are in our room, including making sure they have food and water and having calm and quiet bodies when we are near them.

Sharing an artifact bag.

Writing about the weekend.

Our monarch caterpillars.