Harvest Week

This week will be so fun as we do a lot of harvest activities! We will do pumpkin math all week: measuring, weighing, counting, describing, and writing about our pumpkins. We will have a harvest party on Friday afternoon at 1:30. Thank you for volunteering to donate items.

These are pictures from a while ago, but these are the last of our brown bag activities. They waited so patiently to be the last three to go! This week we will start Star of the Week, which is a year-long project where each student gets a week to be the star and does a show and share on Friday. We learn to write letters by writing letters to each star student!




Here is a picture of two students doing some plant observations.

Reminder

Remember, there is no school this Thursday and Friday, Oct. 21-22. Have a great weekend!

It was great to see so many of you at Back to School Night last week, both homeroom families and Walk to Read families!!! I am enjoying this year so much.

In reading, we are starting to talk about story structure this week, including characters, setting, and problem/solution. We will also begin to work on retelling stories. You can help by asking your children questions about the books they read like, "Who are the characters? What is the setting? What is the problem and how is it solved?"

Writing continues both in homeroom and in Walk to Read. All students are learning about complete sentences, topics, punctuation, and capital letters. Be a stickler about capital letters with your child! First graders should usually be able to determine when to use capital letters at this point.

In math, we learned how to tell time to the hour last week on an analog clock. This week, we are beginning to exchange pennies for nickels and count pennies and nickels together. This can be challenging for many students at first. If your child does not quite understand at first, keep practicing and make it fun. One of you could be the banker and the other can be the customer as you make the exchanging. It helps many students to use real coins as well as draw the coins out on paper as they start to count and exchange money. To count money, your child MUST know how to count by 10's, 5's, and 1's. (Later, we will also use counting by 2's for temperature.)

In science, we will continue learning about living organisms. We have already talked about plant parts and functions, life cycles, and survival needs. Now we will move toward animal classification, food chains, and animal/plant interdependence. Check out some of the websites on our school's library homepage for great games.

We also started more social studies. Social studies standards changed this year, and we have all new materials. There is a strong history focus, and we began by talking about a timeline (an average lifetime) all the way back to Columbus. We will continue discussing perspective, cultures, and history as we continue through People Who Made the Americas.

Of course call me or email me with any questions! Oh, and please remember to send a note or email if your child will be doing something different after school than usual. Have a great week!