Getting into the Groove

I thought that I would take a few minutes to show you some snapshots into our routines that hopefully you are already hearing about from your child!


1. Success Tickets!!! Success tickets are a fun incentive with a bit of luck involved too! If you are caught doing something awesome, you get a ticket! Be sure to put your name on it an toss into our jar, because on Wednesdays and Fridays Miss Young will draw tickets to pick cool stuff from the treasure box! You get one prize for EVERY tickets she pulls with your name on it!! Some friends have already gotten called up three or four times! Some other ways to earn tickets are reading quietly in the hallway in the morning and you get two tickets if you log in your book all week ALL BY YOURSELF! (It's like getting paid!) But watch out... if you flip your card even once on Wednesday or Friday, you don't get to use your tickets. Be careful!



2. C.H.A.M.P.s:  C.H.A.M.P. stands for: C-conversation, H-help, A-activity, M-movement, and P-participation. Miss Young reminds the class of the C.H.A.M.P. expectations for each part of our day. This tells us what exactly we need to do to be "on-the-ball" and ready to learn as much as we can! (It also helps us know what she might look for to give out success tickets and how NOT to get our card flipped.) Mom and Dad, you can remind your child to be a CHAMP at school and follow all the expectations!



3. Superhero Class Promise: Every morning after our Good Morning Boogie Woogie song we proudly recite our class promise together! This is our promise to have good character all day long! We stand tall and proud and give a superhero punch to the air with every promise! I've placed a copy of this class promise in the back of each child's red folder. This is a great place to start discussing expectations for the day or finding our how the day went for your child! For example: "Were you responsible today? Did you do what you needed to do and have what you needed to have? How so?"



4. Poem of the Week: This week we began the routine of learning a poem of the week. This week's poem is called New Friend. I chose this poem for the beginning of the school  year, because I hope your child is making 17 great new friends and teammates this school year! We have read it every day together and I hope you are practicing it at home as well! (A copy is in your child's homework folder.) We have talked about words that repeat, we've talked about the rhyming words, and we've talked about our favorite lines and what they mean to us. I can't wait to see how intelligent they sound discussing poetry by the end of the year! What a bunch of smarty-pants! Oh yeah, and my favorite part- each child randomly got the name of a new friend in the class and had to draw him/her. The result is seen all around the poem. We have some very creative artists in this class as well!




5. Sight Words: Everyday we review our sightwords by singing them to an addictive little tune (Three-Little-Indians). Once we all know them quite well, we will transfer them to our word wall for reference. Sight words are words that a child should learn by sight and be able to read in a "snap!" I will post for you the first nine-weeks' words for your reference. You will probably find it quite helpful to make flash cards for these words (one-nine weeks at a time or even half a nine-weeks). One fun way to spice it up is to add a few cards randomly in the stack that say BOOM! As your child zips through the words in the stack, they run across a BOOM! and get to yell it out! It really keeps them on thier toes.
First Nine-Weeks Words: (Some are a review from kindergarten.)

I	and	said	on
see	go	the	jump
my	is	play	four
like	here	she	not
a	for	are	too
to	have	he	we
five	upon	cold	what
you	find	fall	flower
away	two	one	do
does	in	once	me
he	three	liveh	who
pull	they	where