We welcomed Fall with so much enthusiasm this week! Throughout the week we noticed the leaves changing colors, the air getting “crisper,” and created our very own Scarecrows!
Reading: This week in writing we continued learning Good Reading Habits. Some of the main habits we looked at were rereading to smooth out words and phrases, tracking the words with our eyes to scoop up more words and phrases, and rereading books to read more and develop more meaning. After learning all these great habits, we practiced with our partners. As the partners read to each other, they helped remind each other of good reading habits and congratulated each other when they saw them doing a good habit. We also continued developing our knowledge of sight words by adding was, what, were, and said. Writing: During our writing block we channeled our writing brains to make sure we add details to our pictures and words. As we continued learning about our writing workshop, we talked about how writers will add movement into their pictures to help the readers know what is happening. Our class also started telling our stories in Itsy-Bitsy steps so we could lengthen our small moments. To help with our Itsy-Bitsy steps, we acted out our stories! Some students were jumping into a pile of leaves and showed the class how they jumped while some students talked about seeing frogs jumping into a pond and demonstrated how a frog jumps and splashes into the water! Our writers are getting so good at adding details and movements into our stories! Math: In math we practiced counting on from numbers. We started by counting on by 1 number, then 2 numbers, and finished by counting on by 3 numbers. We acted out counting on to really help visualize the numbers counting on. Our class continued building this skill as we solved story problem and picture problems in our math books. Many students have been noticing improvement in their sprints during math, too! They are getting excited about learning more and more! Science: Our class started learning about living and non-living things this week. We began with an experiment with some flowers in colored water to see what would happen. By the end of the week we noticed that some of the petals started to get some color in them! This helped us learn that living things need water to survive. As a class we made a T-Chart to show the difference between living and nonliving things. At the end of our lessons each student realized that living things need to eat, drink, and breathe! Our first field trip will be on October 25th! We need 5 volunteers to join us on our trip to the zoo! If you would like to go, please let me know! I will accept the first 5 volunteers with their volunteer applications completed! We are all so excited to go see living animals! We are still waiting to find out the price for our field trip due to the buses. Once we know how much the buses will cost we will be sending out a permission slip with the cost included! It was so nice being able to see most of you at curriculum night! Thank you so much for joining us and seeing what your child will be learning about this year!
This week we continued working hard throughout all the different subject blocks! Reading: Our class continued to learn how to be good readers this week by adding more tips and tricks to their toolboxes! Together we learned about what good readers do when they finish a book: readers go back through the book to their favorite parts and see if they missed any details, tell a friend about the book, and think about what might happen next in the story. Each student then worked with a partner to practice what good readers do when they finish a book. It was great seeing some students go read the books their partner told them about because it sounded so interesting! Writing: This week during our writing block we focused on adding more details to our pictures and stories. Together we learned about adding speech bubbles, expressions, and movements to our pictures. After working on our pictures we then used what was happening in our picture to add details to our stories using expressive language, specific words, and leaving space between words. It is incredible to see the stories come to life! Math: In math this week we continued building our knowledge of numbers bonds with the whole being 8, 9, and 10. During our circle time, we used our personal white boards to write addition sentences and complete number bonds using those addition sentences. We also played Sparkle only skip counting by 2’s while counting. Everyone did a great job at counting. After learning all week about the different ways to make 8, 9, and 10, we tested our knowledge by using out Mystery Bag! Inside the Mystery Bag were hiding cubes. Some cubes were brave enough to be come outside the bag and we had to use our understanding of combinations to figure out how many were left inside the bag. The class loved playing this and some even said it was too easy! Science: We continued learning about habitats this week and learning some new vocabulary words such as: Nutrients, Oxygen, and Energy. Together we learned about how animals depend on plants for surviving and vice versa. Many students noticed that plants give us nutrients to stay healthy and the give us the oxygen we need to breathe. We learned that those nutrients are what give our bodies energy to learn, run, and do everything else! To finish the week, we conducted an experiment to see how plants absorb nutrients from water by watching celery sticks change color as they sat in colored water! Please bring in Box Tops by October 9th for our class to win a prize! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! See you on Monday! Our first full week of school went by so fast! This week we were able to practice a fire drill, get a little bit of extra recess, and participate in our first school Soaring Eagle announcements! In addition to all these fun activities, we enjoyed learning new things about our classmates as some butterfly projects made their way back into the class! It was exciting to hear about all the favorite books, movies, and games we share! If you have not turned your butterfly in yet, please bring it in by Tuesday!
Reading: During our reading block this week we learned how to be good readers. Together we talked about the different strategies readers use when reading independently. One strategy everyone really liked was Sneak a Peak. This is when you quickly look through the book to get an idea of what it is about. After reading the story you Check Your Sneak Peak to see if some of your thoughts were right! We used this strategy after picking a new book from our class library to put in our book boxes. Our class has also built up their reading stamina to 9 minutes; way to go First Graders! Writing: This week in writing we learned many ways to strengthen our stories. We learned that all good writers have 3 steps when beginning to write: 1. They think of a small moment from their heart. 2. They plan using pictures. 3. They write! Each student started to write their own small moment! It was so fun to walk around the classroom and see stories about getting ice cream, a giant squid, and going to the park! The next day we learned more strategies that writers use to make their stories even better. Together we learned how to add details to our pictues and words. Many students went back to their pictures to add labels, colors, and other things to show where they story was taking place while other students went back to their writing to talk about how they were feeling, what they saw, and what happened next. We all learned how important it is to add details to our stories to make them more exciting! Math: In math we continued to review and build our number sense of counting and making number bonds for numbers up to 9. We played many games to support these concepts such as Shake Those Disks, Sparkle Counting, Red Light/Green Light, and many others. After playing these games we continued to review our addition problems up to a given number and show all the ways to make that number using our Sprints. Each student raced against the clock to finish completing each number bond problem. After the timer sounded we graded our Sprints and the whole class was able to help me write all the correct answers! By the end of the week, many students were able to show all the ways to make the numbers 8 and 9! Science: We started our first science lessons this week learning about habitats! We learned the vocabulary words Earth, habitat, survive, and shelter. As we learned about these vocabulary words, we talked about how animals and plants live on the Earth and survive. After reading our science books, we found out that animals live in habitats and build shelters to survive. We also learned that some animals need a water habitat to survive and have special traits such as gills to survive. Everyone has enjoyed learning about habitats this week! As a reminder, Curriculum Night is on Thursday, September 20th starting at 6 PM. We will be talking about curriculum and volunteering! I hope you all have a wonderful weekend and get lots of rest! Congratulations to our two Soaring Eagles Natalie and Oliver! Hello families! We have had so much fun this first week of school! I had a great time getting to know each student a little more and seeing what their individual interests are. I think a favorite class activity this week was our GoNoodle breaks! While we had a lot of fun learning about our new class, the school expectations, are our schedule, we also started to get into our academics. Below you can see what we did in each subject area: Reading: This week we read many stories together and talked about the beginning, middle, and end of a story. As a whole class we read the Rainbow Fish and talked about the major parts of the story using the beginning, middle, and end strategy. We all loved how Rainbow Fish shared with his friends in the end! Each student then made their own Rainbow Fish and wrote about how they can show kindness at school; one of our class rules, Be Kind. Writing: We launched our writing workshop this week by examining what a writer does to create a story. Together we read a book called Night of the Veggie Monster by George McClements and discussed what he wrote about. Many students noticed that his story was about a small moment in the characters life; not wanting to eat his peas. We talked about small moments in our lives and then created an inventory of our personal small moments that we can use throughout the year during our writing workshop. Math: This week we reviewed some math facts from Kindergarten and started getting into our first couple of lessons in our math module. Together we practiced the routine of our math lessons by doing our fluency lesson, sprint lessons, and all the other aspects of a daily math lesson. The sprint worksheet was definitely the highlight of our math lessons as each student raced the clock to answer as many problems as possible! Thank you for your continued support during the first week of school! Part of a successful school year is definitely parent support, so thank you so much! Many of you have offered to volunteer in the classroom and we will be talking more about that on Curriculum Night! Purple Folders have started going home this week! As a reminder, students bring home these folders every day and should bring them back to school the following day! Inside these purple folders you can put notes for me or guest buss passes. Guest Bus Passes will be available starting September 19th! During afternoon snack some students have mentioned how hungry they are (growing bodies!!). If you would like to donate a bag of snacks such as pretzels or goldfish crackers that would be greatly appreciated. You can send it with your student on Monday. **We have a nut/tree nut allergy so please make sure the snack is nut free! I also wanted to apologize for my website not being up yet! I will send out a link to our class website once it has been finished! Have a terrific weekend! |