Can somebody tell me how we are already to the end of October?!?  Seriously, the school year is flying by.  Next week, we will reach our 50th day of school already--CRAZY!  

This time of year always makes my little teacher heart happy, and I'll tell you why...It's always the time where the kids begin to put their knowledge of letter sounds together to start reading and writing phonetically.  They start off a little unsure of this ability, but it doesn't take long for them to see they have all the pieces they need to perform these skills.  

We like to reinforce letter identification and beginning letter sounds in our morning centers this time of year.  Here are some of our centers from a few weeks ago:

In this center, they used the clothespins with a letter on it, and clipped it to the card that started with that letter.  

Alphabet Soup is a great game for letter recognition.  They scoop out a ping pong ball with a letter written on it, then find and color the corresponding letter on that sheet.  

This was a fun, reinforcing center on beginning sounds.  They each had cards, and had to put the magnetic letter below the picture.  

We started working on word families, and the _at family is the first one we learn.  We used these as letter vests and "squish" together to form different words.  

In our math binders, we were spinning and tallying the numbers.  They work with partners for their math binder work--and always have a great time!

Ten frames, ten frames and more ten frames!!  

One of their favorite things to do is to work in our Interactive Language Arts Notebook.  

We worked on our sight words here, but we also use it to write, recognize, and practice sounds for each of the letters of the alphabet.  

The kids are using their "attenti-scopes" that Mrs. Row teaches them in our Second Step program.  

Bats, spiders, Halloween have been our theme study for the month of October.  Here are some pictures of things we have been up to:

Here are some examples of that wonderful phonetic spelling I was telling you about. We read the book Crankenstein--a story about a cranky little boy who's grouchy mood changes him into Crankenstein.   I especially empathize with this little sweetie's answer:

I see more and more writing like this in their journals, on their papers, etc.  And it is so exciting to see.  

We got more/new alternative seating that we will rotate throughout the classroom.  I am so excited about this, as I mentioned in an earlier post the benefits of alternative seating in education.  Here is us on day 1.