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.
Remember, there is no school this Thursday and Friday, Oct. 21-22. Have a great weekend!
Monday, October 11, 2010
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!
I. love. my. class. Seriously. This is such a sweet group of kids, and I am so impressed with their academic skills already. Here is a few things we did this week.
Here is one group using pattern blocks during math to make patterns and designs. We were exploring our math manipulatives.
Here is one student playing with our math dominoes during FREE TIME. When the class is being exceptionally amazing, I put up letters on the board to spell FREE TIME. When they get all of the letters, we have free time, and they earned it already! Some students played legos, others played with dolls or colored, and others played with hot wheels cars. (If you are ever going to give any good free time toys to the thrift store, consider donating them to our classroom instead.)
Two students making shapes on the geoboards.
The base 10 blocks are a definite favorite.
More geoboards.
Another student revealing her About Me Bag.
We also planted seeds this week as well as made terrariums. Our first unit in science is all about living organisms: life cycles, survival needs, classification, etc. This unit is a lot of fun. Please plan to come to our room to see more on October 7.
Our Walk to Read program is ready for volunteers. Some have already started and more will be starting next week, but if you are available to volunteer, please contact me. We would LOVE to have you read with kids. Also, if you are available in the next few weeks for some simple (although boring) administrative tasks in the next couple weeks, let me know. I have quite a few things that need to be filed, cut out, torn out, or stapled. We will also be hoping to have a few chaperones for our Sept. 28 trip to the Bozeman Ponds. Thank you!!!
Your kids are amazing!! Thank you for the privilege of working with them.
Hi! I am your child's Walk to Read teacher. Thank you so much for muddling through the first week of homework and procedures! I waited to send out a welcome letter because I knew there would be some switching around after the first week, so thank you for hanging in there with me!
I mentioned making bags for "tricky words" (also known ask high-frequency or sight words.) Here is what I mean by making two bags. This is an easy way to keep track of your word cards all year and even add more that you find as your child reads to you. The goal is for your child to know over 100 of these tricky words by the end of first grade, but I think this group will know more like 200!! These are words that cannot be sounded out (like "the") and must be memorized. They make up over 60% of written text in English, so you can see the importance of practicing nightly!!! Keep practice short: 5 minutes or less. The other 15 minutes of reading homework should be your child reading to you or you reading to your child or both.
When I send short books home like this one, please have your child read it THREE times out loud to you. If it is difficult, try alternating pages with him or her: you read one, your child reads one, etc. Most of these books we will have already read in class, so they should be fairly easy. I ask that your child reads them three times because rereading is the best way to build fluency (reading like you talk), and that is a major focus in our group!
Remember, the reading bags need to come back EVERY day with reading record filled out with what your child read the night before. Please always return the paper books as these come from my own classroom. Some nights I will not send books home. Please read a book at home with your child and still write it down on the reading record.
Thank you for all of your hard work. I look forward to all of the growth we will get to see this year!!!
Please contact me with any questions or concerns! I will get back to you as soon as I can.
I hope you had as much fun as I did at the Fall Festival this year! It was so good to see so many of you there! We had a wonderful turnout. The weather was perfect! This is my absolute favorite dunk tank picture. Mr. Brian is our room's custodian, and he was graciously dunked many times. It never stopped being funny!
My nieces playing games. They are second graders this year at Hyalite.
