September 22-26

Hello First Grade Families!

Here's a sneak peak at our short week...

Here's our Royal Court, the last of our Kings & Queens!

 

 

During Writer's Workshop, we began our Small Moments unit. Thank you so much for sending in your child's idea sheet for this unit! Many of the kiddos have referred to them during writing time. 

We have learned the steps of writing a small moment story: First we need to think of something that we have done or something that we do. Next, we picture it in our minds or make a movie of it. Then we draw a quick sketch of our idea. Finally, we write words to go with our sketches. As our lessons move along, we'll elaborate on these steps.

We used George McClements as one of our mentor authors. He showed us how he wrote a small moment across several pages by remembering all the details of a little boy eating one pea! It's a very silly story called Night of the Veggie Monster. Ask your writer to tell you all about it! 


We also looked at how Audrey Penn did the same thing in an "old favorite," The Kissing Hand.







In Reader's Workshop this week we continued to focus on reading long and strong. We talked about how important it is to be "wide awake readers" so that we're sure we understand what we're reading. We know we're wide awake when we're thinking about what we're reading. Sometimes we wonder about what we're reading and ask questions before, during and after reading. 

We used Kevin Henkes' book Penny and Her Marble this week to do some shared thinking and have some shared conversations. These conversations are so important as we develop as readers! We learned that during "circle talk" we don't have to raise our hands; we just have conversations with each other. But, we DO need to remember that only one person speaks at a time; this can be tricky at first, but with a lot of practice we'll be circle talk experts! Our conversations helped us to then write about our thinking on post-it notes. We wrote about our thoughts on Penny and Her Marble and on our own just-right books. Here is some of the thinking we've done: 

In Math this week we continued focusing on number partners. We worked with partners of 6, 7, and 8. One way we supported this learning was by playing a game using chips that have a different color on each side. We dropped the chips and wrote the equation that our chips showed. Our partner then wrote the equation another way. We continued to use our stair steps to break numbers into two partners and to then switch those partners. We're also beginning to see how we can use addition to help us understand subtraction. We repeat these activities with each new number within 10 so that we can become fluent with addition and subtraction within 10. This knowledge will be necessary as we move into working with numbers within 20!

During Guidance with Mrs. G this week, we explored how we can work together productively. Each team worked on a drawing of a silly animal, but we couldn't tell anyone what to do; we could only encourage and support them. We started with a blank paper, and the first person in the group began to draw. Then it was time to pass the paper onto the next person. That person then continued the drawing while the others encouraged and gave compliments. Here is one of our teams and their silly animal: 

In science this week we continued our look at the weather. We began a weather chart where we will record each day's cloud cover, precipitation and wind speed using our class wind scale (0=No wind, 1=Some wind, 3=Strong wind). We created wind flags to help us determine what the wind speed is each day. Here we are outside with our wind flags: 

And here is Friday's entry for our weather calendar (sunny, no precipitation, some wind): 

It was another great week in Room 122!

Mark your calendars:

September 30: Lockdown/Evacuation/Reunification Drill

October 1: Literacy Night

Innisbrook Gift Wrap Fundraiser: October 1-24

October 7: Jose's Blue Sombrero Night - 25% of food proceeds to FPBS-PTO

Conferences: October 16, 17 & 22

October 17: No school for students

October 17: Monster Bash

Thanks for stopping by the blog!

Michelle Mullen