October CLD News
2025-2026 Ms. Romero & Mrs. Fox
Capitalizing the Letter I
Across every level of learning we are reminding students to capitalize the letter 'i' when it stands alone in a sentence, representing your name. Click on the picture to watch a short little video to reinforce this learning. Our middle schoolers and intermediate students may roll their eyes and say they know this rule, but we see this error often in their writing.
Legibility
When it comes to composing written work, we are asking students to pull off a very complicated task. Creating a written product requires, decoding, memory, comprehension, synthesis of thought, and fluent hand writing skills. There are foundational writing skills that serve as the scaffolding for communicating through the written word, whether it be writing a story, sending a letter to a grandparent, composing a play and filling out job applications. Even in the day and age of computers, typing and texting, developing our ability to write legibly and efficiently remains a valuable skill.
Check out this video to learn how to use graph paper to help improve legibility.
Speaking in Complete Sentences
Language (Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing):
We continue to build our knowledge around school vocabulary words by singing songs, playing games, and having scavenger hunts to find school items. We will make a small school supply book and read it in a large group and with partners. We created our own vocabulary flash cards and quizzed our friends on the new words (please practice with these at home). We will create a paper back pack with school supplies and present them to the group. We have worked with our middle school learning buddies to reinforce reading comprehension, letter identification, and working with sight words. Our next unit will be about our bodies, clothing, seasons, and feelings.
- Link to the the School Supply Song
Early Literacy:
- Extra practice opportunities to practice letter sound correspondence. We are working on the letters (a, t, m, s, p, f, i, n) Check out our sound deck here.
- Here is the link to our picture deck. This is great practice for home.
- Writing letters
- Building words with magnetic letters (sat, mat, pat, sip, sit, pit, mit)
Language (Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing):
We have been working on developing "who, what, and where" questions in complete sentences. We interviewed a friend and organized the questions we developed for them. We presented the information we learned about our friend to the large group. We created a personal profile on ourselves, made a graphic organizer, then wrote some important descriptive words and sentences to present out to the the group. We made a classroom connection and worked on addition, subtraction, and more and less than. We will be starting our next unit on problem solving soon.
Early Literacy:
- One group of students is reviewing letter sound correspondence with intensive review. For example, we are working on a letter grouping (a, t, s, m, i, f, p, n) With these letters, we read and write words, and then read decodable text that focuses specifically on these letters.
- One group is continuing a review of previous learned phonics concepts. After review and reading, we challenge ourselves to apply phonics concepts in longer text, followed by writing to respond to text. Click here for text to practice.
Language (Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing):
We read "Antonio's First Day at School" and focused on writing sentences with details to give a partner clues in a classroom scavenger hunt similar to what happened in the story. We practiced our speaking skills by recording answers and responded to a virtual student around our topic of study. We learned how give a summary of a story in a sequence. We created a graphic organizer about people in our school community and wrote about the ways that they have impacted our lives. We then created thank you cards for the school community members that we chose. In our next unit we will be learning about the digital word.
Early Literacy:
- Groups are participating in an intensive review of past phonics concepts.
- Our students who are new to reading in English, we have emphasized the differences in the way vowels are pronounced in English and Spanish.
- This video helps us learn the difference in pronouncing 'O', in English vs. Spanish.
- With each review concept we work on responding to the text with the use of thinking maps.
What's Happening in Middle School
In the past few weeks we have been activating our background knowledge, through speaking and writing, as well as, learning new vocabulary to support reading the story, The Burrito Man, by Lulu Delacre. It is part of her short story collection about youn Latinos.
Ask your Middle School students about the story, and the following vocabulary words.
- customer
- league
- honor
- vision
- purchased
- relieved
- responds
- assigned
- exclaims
Students in Middle School are Reading to Learn and Writing to Express Their Knowledge.
Our middle school students may not have as many opportunities to read out loud as they did when they were younger, so creating those chances at home can have a positive impact on their fluency and confidence as a reader. Below are some great activites for middle school students to support their fluency.
Ms. Romero and Mrs. Fox will both have slots available. You are welcome to sign up for one of us, or for both of us.
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Calendar
Peanut Free School
Our School Community:
We are a true school family and community. At Metropolitan Art's Academy we provide a rigorous arts integration program to enhance student creativity while catering to diverse learning styles. The Met views success by integrating competency based-learning with student agency to build learning targets at a customized pace using an artistic lens.
