We have been learning different ways of reading a book to ourselves and to our partners. We learn to look at the pages again and see what we missed the first time. We pay attention to the parts of the book that make us more curious or more excited. We look for words that might be connected to what the book is about. We relate what's in the book to things we already know about. We look at the pictures and connect them to words. What does this look like? When we are reading a book about beetles, we notice that one beetle is spraying something. What's that? It's poisonous gas to protect itself! Two beetles are fighting. What are those great big "antlers"? Oh, they use them to fight. If the book is about beetles can we find a word that looks like beetle on each page? We recently spent our time looking for the word "the" in our books and noting it when we saw it. We looked for the word "is" too.  Using these kinds of clues one child discovered that he could read half of his book about soccer to the class. It's exciting. We are working in our reading groups too and are matching rhyming words and beginning sounds as well.

We have been measuring lots of things in math. Most recently we measured our names by making a cube letter for each letter in our name and comparing our towers to the names of other kids in the class. Currently we are taking four handfuls of cubes and comparing the towers we build, as we put them in order from the smallest to the largest. We are also emphasizing vocabulary such as more, most, less, least, fewer, fewest, and greater, greatest, as we talk about our towers.

Tomorrow we will make leaf collage pictures with our buddies and plan to have them ready to share at assembly on Friday, November 18th. I will let you know closer to the time.