Grab a cup of your favorite beverage, sit back, relax and be ready to be wowed by some pretty incredible first graders! In the past week and a half together we have published, performed, played, observed puddles, and more!
Writer's Workshop
The past couple weeks found us selecting one small moment piece that was close to our hearts, one that we wanted to fix up and fancy up in preparation for our Writers' Gallery Walk. We worked very hard to both edit and revise our work and learned that this doesn't all happen in one day but over a number of days! Our writing partners helped us along the way, providing feedback for us and reading our pieces aloud so that we could hear if they sounded like we intended them to.
We also got out our narrative writing checklists and carefully checked each page of our stories one at a time. Phew! It was a lot of work! Finally we were ready to decide on a title and design a cover. We looked at covers of some of our favorite books to see how other authors/illustrators used color, font, font size, etc. Some of our friends even wrote a "blurb" and an "About the Author" page. It was quite the publishing house in here! Our last finishing touch: we each created a beautiful frame to showcase our masterpieces!
Our big day arrived - our writing celebration! We invited our K4 and K5 teachers and Mrs. Grimm-Nilsen to come read our stories and leave us a comment in our guest books. After we each read our pieces to the class, we then went around and left comments for our peers.
Here we all are with our finished pieces - what an incredibly talented crew!
This week, we also met our K4 book buddies which gave us another opportunity to share our masterpieces!
Reader's Workshop/Author Study
In Reader's Workshop, we continued our focus on story elements with much of our work thinking about the most important parts of the story as opposed to ALL of the details. We did this work through our continued focus on our mentor author Cynthia Rylant.
Science
In science we learned about the water cycle through our puddle investigations. Part of the water we used came from the rain gauges we set up outside a couple weeks ago. We were thrilled to find that our water had frozen! It was a great lesson in how states of matter change: liquid to a solid!
We put the ice in our puddle tins and added some more water with food coloring added so that we could better observe our "puddles" throughout the week. 
When we came back to school on Monday, we noticed that our ice melted, and some of our water was gone: evaporation! Over the next couple days, it completely vanished! Hmmm... where did it go?
Betty Brinn
We thoroughly enjoyed ourselves learning about "Marvelous Math" at Betty Brinn. After a short program, we all had time to explore all the different areas of the museum. Thank you to our PTO for funding this fun learning experience! Thank you as well to our chaperones!
Word Work
We have begun our close look at vowels. Our focus has been on short and long /a/. We found out that long /a/ can be spelled in many different ways! We applied this work to our reading, particularly when we come to a tricky word. Now we know we can "flip the sound." We also used what we know about making words to do a holiday making words with the words "Thank you." We discovered that we can make LOADS of words with those 8 letters!
Next week's words:
don't
out
their
them
then
Thanksgiving
What Thanksgiving would be complete without turkey headbands?! We enjoyed some relaxing time with our watercolors preparing our headbands for our presentation of "Albuquerque Turkey" for our entire first grade! On Wednesday morning we all gathered in the board room where each first grade class performed a song or poem. After that, we headed to our classrooms for some popcorn and the movie This is America, Charlie Brown: The Mayflower Voyage.
Congratulations to our first graders on a wonderful Informance, and a HUGE thank you to our specialists for putting together an incredible program!
It has been a very productive and fun couple of weeks! We hope you enjoyed reading all about it and seeing us in action! As this Thanksgiving holiday comes to a close, I want to tell you all how thankful I am for each and every one of you. Thank you for sending your kiddos to me, ready to learn each day. They are a joy, and I am beyond grateful!
Michelle Mullen
Mark Your Calendars:
December 5th: PAJAMA DAY!
December 10: Early Release
December 19: Last day before winter break
January 5: Welcome back!
