A Busy Halloween Week

Hello Parents,

If you haven’t heard, Halloween is on Thursday!  As you may imagine we have a countdown in our class until this special day.  Students asked when Halloween was on October 1st, haha.  For those students who would like to participate, we will be parading our costumes down the halls and into the first and second grade classrooms.  Students will have an opportunity to put on their costumes at 12:30, to then parade at 12:45.  When sending students to school, please send them in their regular everyday clothes, as it becomes very difficult to learn when you are surrounded by goblins, ghosts and princesses:)  

We will also be participating in Fun-O-Ween put on by the middle school students at 1:30 on Thursday and will be there for the remainder of the day.  We will be playing games and doing activities with some amazing role models in our school.

Along with Halloween on Thursday, you may have read in The Viking, that the middle schoolers are participating in school spirit week.  Some of the younger grades are also participating.  Our class will be participating.  If you weren’t able to find the spirit week schedule in The Viking, the schedule is as follows:

Monday: Sunglasses Day (I shade out bad habits)

Tuesday: Team Day-Wear your favorite team jersey (I am part of something special and I belong)

Wednesday: Hat Day (I use my head to make healthy, self-respecting choices)

Thursday: Halloween Costume Day (Everything is good in moderation (costumes, candy).  I have fun and understand boundaries and limits)

Friday: Pajama Day (I take care of myself getting plenty of rest, sleep, and relaxation)  

In addition to all of the fun and dressing up this week, we will be learning too!  We will continue with our pumpkin/Halloween theme through the rest of this week.  Students have been busy creating skeletons, recreating the pumpkin growing process, and graphing Halloween themed questions such as, “Do Spiders Make Good Pets?”  Ask your student what his/her response was and why.  Part of our “habits of mind” focus, we are learning to justify our answers.

In Fundations, we are learning the letter/sound keywords for letters p, and j.  Continue asking your students questions that challenge their ability to hear the beginning letter sounds.  If you feel as though they have a clear understanding of initial sounds, move on to the middle and ending sounds.  Students can “tap out” words.  Many students are in the beginning stages of being able to “tap out” words.  Questions such as, “What letter sound do you hear at the beginning of the word, bark?”  and if they can quickly respond with a “b”, see if they can hear the “r” sound in the middle of the word.  According to Lisa Moats, in the book, How Children Learn to Spell,

     

“Psychologists once believed that children learned to spell by using rote visual memory to string letters together like beads on a necklace. But that thinking has changed in the last 20 years. Researchers have discovered that a child's memory for words is not entirely or even principally rote. They have found, instead, that two important processes come into play concerning spelling.

First, we now know that a child learns to spell in a roughly predictable series of steps that build on one another (Ehri 1986, 1994; Gill, 1992; Henderson, 1990). Second, we also now understand that spelling memory is dependent on a child's growing knowledge of spoken and written word structure.

Visual Memory and Spelling Memory

While visual memory -- more specifically, "orthographic" memory -- is vital for learning to spell, it doesn't work alone. Spelling memory -- memory for letter sequences -- is enhanced by a child's awareness of phonemes, or speech sounds. At more advanced levels, spelling memory draws on a child's knowledge of word structure, words' meaningful parts, a word's relationship to other words, and so on. Word knowledge builds systematically on other word knowledge. It's that cycle of success that teachers love to see develop: Learning begets learning.

Precommunicative Writing Stage

Most young children who are exposed to print in their homes spontaneously begin to experiment with writing. Although they may know the names of some letters, recognize letter forms, and realize that letters represent speech sounds, they may not understand what a word is or realize that print represents words and that spaces represent boundaries between them. Reading at this stage is "logographic," meaning that a child guesses at whole words based on their visual features (Ehri, 1994).

Semiphonetic Stage

After children have experimented with imitative writing and developed an awareness of alphabet letter names, a shift occurs. They begin to realize that letters represent speech sounds (Bissex, 1980; Gentry, 1981; Henderson, 1990), and selectively and predictably use abbreviated spellings.

For example, a child may use a few letters, usually consonants, to represent words, syllables, initial letters, or pieces of words. Often these consonants correspond to an alphabet letter name. At this stage, children may use their knowledge of letter names and partial phonetic cues to read (Ehri 1994), but their ability to identify and segment word sounds is still limited.

Phonetic Spelling Stage

As children gain more knowledge of print and develop an awareness of speech sounds, sound-letter correspondences, and letter names, they often employ a "one letter spells one sound" strategy. This typically occurs in kindergarten and early first grade. At this point, children "spell" by matching sounds to letters and consistently representing all of a word's sounds. To do this they rely on how words feel in their mouths.

Widely known as "invented spelling" or "temporary spelling," this process means that children use phonetic spellings and letter names to represent long or short vowels and consonants. This stage is typical of five- and six-year-olds who are signaling their readiness to learn conventional spelling patterns. Here are some typical examples of invented spellings:

DA (day)

WEL (will)

KAM (came)

BAD (bed)

FEL (feel)

SAD (said)

LIK (like)

YOH (watch)

FES (fish)

YL (will)

YAR (where)

As children gain exposure to print, practice writing, and become even more aware of the sounds in words, they begin to recognize and recall larger orthographic patterns, or "chunks", and use them to spell other words. For example, a typical first grader's spellings of common words might change over a period of several months as follows:

AKT

ASK

ASKED

YL

YEL

WIL

WILL

TGK

THIEK

TANGK

THINGK

THINK

What do children need to know to move beyond temporary spellings? A lot! To progress, children must master letter combinations, spelling patterns, and ending rules. They must also master the phonic elements of consonants, vowels, consonant blends, and consonant digraphs -- and much more. When they move from early to transitional stages, they're on the way to learning the patterns and rules that make for good spelling.

Transitional Spelling Stage

After children gain more experience with print, receive systematic instruction, and improve their reading ability, they begin to understand that most sounds are represented by letter combinations. They see that syllables are spelled in predictable ways and meaningful parts of words, such as grammatical endings and Latin and Greek roots and affixes, are preserved in English. A child at this stage is likely to make errors such as the following:

PAPRES (papers)

HIAR (hair)

MOVEING (moving)

SRATE (straight)

PLAITID (planted)

NHITE (night)

While these spellings may look more "off base" than simple phonetic spellings, such as paprs or har, a child at this stage knows that many spellings for sounds require more than one letter or contain certain letter combinations. The child is using, but confusing, constructions such as multiletter vowel spellings and is now ready for direct instruction in grammatical endings (inflections, such as -ed, -s, -ing, and so on), base word plus suffix combinations, and complex vowel spellings (Invernizzi, Abouzeid, and Gill, 1994).

Integration Stage

As students move from phonetic (sound) to syllabic (syllable) and morphemic (meaning) spelling, which typically occurs after the fourth grade, instruction should yield several things: Students should begin to consistently spell meaningful parts such as roots, prefixes, and suffixes. They should know that homophones, learned in meaningful phrases, demonstrate an important principle of English spelling -- that the meaning of a word can determine how it is spelled. They should recognize compounds as such.

Here are some examples:

• Children at this stage learn more easily those roots or base words that do not require a change in sound or spelling when the prefix or suffix is added -- such as enjoyment, distasteful, or words with un-, re-, dis-, or -ness -- than they learn words such as competition.
• By the fourth grade, most students are able to use their knowledge of prefixes, suffixes, and roots to decipher hundreds of new words encountered in reading. (Before this point, children must have developed at least a rudimentary awareness of these common morphemes in their expanding speaking vocabulary.)
• To spell words with prefixes and suffixes, children at this stage should become aware of schwa, or the unaccented vowel. In multisyllable words with affixes, especially those of Latin origin, the accent or stress is usually on the root morpheme; the affixes are often spoken with a reduced vowel whose identity can't be determined from pronunciation alone (television, incomparable, benefactor).
• Knowing the meaning of the affix and its standard spelling can resolve the ambiguity created by the reduction of a spoken vowel to schwa. For example, the "pre" in prescription, or the "re" in reduce are difficult to identify if one relies only on speech, because they are unaccented. They should be learned as meaningful prefixes with standard spellings. Otherwise students can't sound them out successfully.
• At this stage, children use a word's context to correctly spell homophones -- words that sound alike but are spelled differently -- such as two, to, and too and aloud and allowed. Children also recognize compounds -- such as playmate, something, and boyfriend -- and are more likely to spell them correctly if the stress is on the first word and the child recognizes the word as a compound. If not, the child may spell the "oy" in boyfriend as "oi."

During Bridges Math, we will learn some new activities and games.  Hands-on activities and games are important for student skill application, building self-concept and developing positive attitudes towards mathematics, through reducing the fear of failure and error.

In our writing club, Writer’s Workshop, we will be continuing our exploration of writing prompts.  All of the kindergarten classes will be completing the school-wide prompt this week.  The prompt will reflect one of our thinking habits we have been focusing on.

The Habits of Mind or thinking habits are:   

It has been brought to my attention that some parents haven’t been able to sign-up for a mystery reader date because of difficulty logging into the sign-up page.  If you have had this problem and would like to sign-up, please send me an email and I will put you on the schedule.   

I think that is all for now, 6 pages later... I hope everyone has a fantastic week!

Thank you,

Jenn