Monday, October 31, 2011

Treasures

CA Treasures Last week’s story was The Little Red Hen. The theme was helping out at home. How do you help? What jobs do you like to do? The high frequency words for the week were: who, no, some, of and eat. Here is the link to last week’s spelling and vocabulary activities: The Little Red Hen

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

Early Readers

The blog, Imagination Soup, has a list of newly published early readers. Melissa Taylor looks for engaging books with beautiful illustrations  and appropriate text.  I have included a couple of her recommended books because I know kids who love them both.










Fly Guy vs.. The Flyswatter is the tenth book in the Fly Guy series. Fly Guy is the extraordinary pet fly of a boy named Buzz.  In this book, Buzz’s class goes on a field trip to a factory that makes flyswatters. As always, chaos ensues and Fly Guy saves the day.
Ant in Her Pants  is about what happens when Miss Grant gets an ant in her pants. This book is part of a series of readers that focus on phonics for beginning readers.  At the end of the book is a Sight Word game and  Phonics Rhyming, Word Game Bingo and Make a Word games.
Check out the rest of the list at http://imaginationsoup.net/

FUNtazmagoria

Funtazmagoria

Family fun at the Children’s Museum of Sonoma County on Sunday, October 30th from 10 A.M. to 2 P.M. The museum’s new home is at 1835 W Steele Lane in Santa Rosa. There will be a costume parade at 11 A.M., art projects, a  Mad Scientist’s laboratory, a spooky room and much more. A $5 per person suggested donation includes  a complimentary lunch. For more information go to http://cmosc.org/

Sunday, October 23, 2011

California Treasures Reading Program

 CA Treasures As many of you know, Yulupa has a new reading program this year, Macmillan/McGraw-Hill’s California Treasures. We are a little late to the party but this blog intends to report weekly on what is happening in the first grade classroom. The first grade is working on Book 2, Our Families, Our Neighbors. Last week’s story was Animal Moms and Dads.  How are our families like animal families? The high frequency words for the week are: two, our, her, they.  This is the link to last week’s page http://treasures.macmillanmh.com  for discussion questions and links to vocabulary and spelling activities.

Eric Carle

Mrs..  Buffleben’s First Grade class read several books by Eric Carle including:

 

After the class read the books by Eric Carle they made their own art using his collage techniques. First, they colored the paper with paints the same way Eric Carle paints his paper. It took several days for the paper to dry. When the paper was ready, it was time to make the collages. Each student chose a character from one of the books the class had read and chose papers that matched the colors of his or her character.  The results:

Eric Carle

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Tuesday, October 11, 2011

Yesterday was the first day that Schools of Hope volunteers were working with some Yulupa first and second graders. Schools of Hope is a program sponsored by United Way of the Wine Country patterned on a program that started in Madison, WI in 1995. Only 46% of third graders in the elementary schools feeding into the Santa Rosa High School District read at grade level. The Schools of Hope goal is to raise that to 90% by 2020. Currently, there are 10 Santa Rosa area schools in the program.
This is the second year for Schools of Hope (SOH) at Yulupa. We worked with 28 first graders last year on phonics, sight words and reading in two half hour sessions per week. These students needed a little extra help to get to grade level. Only two second graders who had tutors last year need that extra help this year. We need several more volunteers to make sure that every student who needs help gets it. If you are interested or know someone who might be, please contact Barbara Fisher at the Volunteer Center (707) 573-3399 x122 or by e-mailing bfisher@volunteernow.org for more information.

I Love to Read!

Once upon a time there was a boy who thought reading was only for school and not for fun. He did well in school but he didn’t think about reading just for fun. One of his teachers decided to have Book Club Fridays. Everyone sat in a circle and talked about the books they were reading. One Friday the boy came home, ran to his mother and gave her a big hug and said, “I love to read! You can go anywhere and be anything; all you have to do is read a book.”
The boy is a grown man who still loves to read and has passed his love of reading to his son and daughter. This blog is dedicated to the teachers who taught the boy how to read and led him to love reading.