October 27-31

Dear First Grade Families,

What a BUGGY week it was! At last week's assembly, we all learned about how we can earn BUGs for Being Unusually Good. Well, so many of our friends did just that and earned an "earned encouragement" which comes in the form of a paper ticket of sorts. One copy of the BUG goes in our classroom bug jar, and the other copy goes home so that families can celebrate the buggy behavior! Our bugs are then transferred to a grade level bug box where Mrs. Grimm-Nilsen selects one child from each grade level to have their photo taken with her. These will be placed on a special "BUG" board in our school.

During Reader's Workshop, we continued discussing strategies we can use when we come to tricky words, and we practiced these together as a whole group then independently and with partners. It's been great to see the boys and girls not only using these strategies during guided reading groups but also telling the HOW and WHY they used a particular strategy/strategies. 

Our Writer's Workshop lessons this week tied in with our Reader's Workshop focus which makes for some very powerful lessons! We talked about how we can use familiar words to spell new words. In other words, if I know... then I know... We added this to our Ways to Spell anchor chart.

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This past week we also received a kid-friendly editing checklist to help remind us to reread our work to check for capital letters at the beginning of sentences and punctuation at the end. I shared with the kiddos a small moment piece I wrote that Mr. Mullen read out loud, and I discovered that it wasn't at all how I meant for the story to go! We learned that we really need to think about our reader and make sure our story is the best that it can be, so that the reader reads it the way we thought about it. Friends shared their pieces with each other by having their partner read their work out loud. Many discovered that they needed to add punctuation to their work. 

 

During Writer's Workshop we also took another look at George McClement's book Night of the Veggie Monster and discovered that he used ellipsis, POP OUT words, and wrote about the exact actions of his characters in order to bring his story to life. Many of our friends said, "Hey, I want to try that, too" and they did...

 For Fire Safety month, Mr. Scott came to talk with us about fire safety. He also brought along a special friend for each classroom: Sparky! When it's our turn to be Star of the Week, we'll bring home Sparky and his scrapbook. The boys and girls are SO excited about this!

We had a special visitor to our classroom this week. Ask your first grader what this visitor  was and who brought it in: 

In math this week, we began looking at subtraction. We discovered that for our circle drawings we shouldn't draw MORE circles but rather cross some out. This was tricky for some of us. With a lot of practice through games with friends and with Mrs. Mullen, we had it!

 

On Friday afternoon we celebrated Halloween! Here are some highlights of the afternoon:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


As you can see, it was a REALLY fun time! Thank you so much to our volunteers who sent in items for Frankenpudding and to our classroom volunteers! We couldn't have done it without you!

Next Week's Word Wall Words:

were

when

your

said

went

Be sure to visit www.spellingcity.com during the week so that your child can practice his/her words. We will likely spend two weeks with these words since they are some of the more difficult of the year and because this will be a short week.

Mark Your Calendars:
Friday, November 7: NO SCHOOL for students. Professional Development Day for Staff
Wednesday, November 12: Early Release
Friday, November 21: Betty Brinn Field Trip - Permission slip was sent home Friday
Wednesday, November 26: Half Day
Thursday & Friday November 27 & 28: NO SCHOOL for Thanksgiving holiday

Thanks for stopping by!
Michelle Mullen