Poindexter Press for the week of January 7th-11th, 2008

Welcome back to school! I hope that you all had wonderful holiday and were able to spend some relaxing time with your families. We are back in the swing of things in our classroom and the children seem to have grown so much in the last 2 weeks! We are pleased to have my student teacher, Miss Kelley Sweet with us in our classroom until the end of February. She has written a introductory letter and you will find it attached to this newsletter. She is open to any comments, suggestions, and questions, so please feel free pass them along. During her time in our classroom, she will spend 2 weeks co-teaching with me and then will be teaching the children during the entire month of February. She will be responsible for all the lesson planning, homework, newsletters, and anything else that comes along with doing my job! :)

This week we have been working with rebus stories. Rebus stories have words and pictures on each page and are great for beginning readers because as they look through the book, they see some "words" they can read by looking at the pictures in the sentences. The story we are reading is called The Jacket I Wear in the Snow. Monday, we took a picture walk through the story and then read it aloud. Tuesday, we expanded on that by re-reading the story and the children echo read the story with me. Wednesday, we matched the pictures in the story with their words. Thursday, we took the words and pictures and put them in the order that they were in in the story.

The children are doing a great job writing!! This week, I introduced booklets! Many of the children have taken off writing short stories and some are writing short chapter books! We also learned about making lists and the children thought up a list of reasons to make lists. Encourage them at home to make lists and to help you make lists (grocery lists, birthday lists, to do lists, etc.)

Due to some problems with technology, I switched the classroom blog site to a new address: http://www.poindexterpressonline.blogspot

I hope to get all of the old information switched over, but all the new information is there already. Please let me know if there is anything you would like to see added to the new site. I am able to add pictures and other information more easily with this site than the last, so I hope to be able to post LOTS more quickly.