Here's a sneak-peek at our short week:
In Writer's Workshop this week we were busy at work on our realistic fiction series. With our guest teacher Mrs. Lurie, we looked at our narrative writing checklists in order to assess where we are and to set goals for the future. We decided to have a look at the second grade checklist, and guess what? We discovered that we are even working on second grade skills! We really are SUPER SERIES WRITERS!
We spent time this week working on punctuation and even had a "punctuation party." What party would be complete without a gift? Each of our super series writers received a special punctuation pencil to use while editing for punctuation! We discovered that we can read our work aloud to ourselves to listen for punctuation. This helps us to be sure that we are giving our readers the right orders about how our story should sound. The next day was even more powerful when we had our writing partner read our work to us! For some of us, we noticed right away when something didn't sound quite how we wanted it to sound. We then quickly got out our brand-new punctuation pencils and got to work! Here are a couple examples:
During Reader's Workshop this week we spent some time with our latest issue of Scholastic News where we made connections to our learning in science: states of matter! It was interesting that the article was about Lake Michigan! This week we also continued work with our character study, paying close attention to our characters in order to not only learn more about what kind of people they are but also to help us understand the story better. We focused on imagining what our characters are thinking and making connections to our characters by thinking about how we are like our characters and how we are different from them.
During Math this past week we continued our work with place value by visualizing teen addition and learning teen addition strategies. Here is one of our friends showing a new strategy she learned.
During Science this week we continued our focus on states of matter. First we had a look at what happened to the water we put in our petri dishes last week. We discovered that the water that was in the covered petri dishes remained, but the water that was in the petri dishes that were not covered disappeared! Ask your first grader what happened to the water. Our experiment this week focused on condensation. We discovered that when water vapor cools, it can change back to a liquid. We were excited to see the water cycle at work with some of us exclaiming, "It's raining in our cup!" Ask your first grader to tell you about how we set up our experiment and what we observed in each of the cups.
Because of our short week, we'll continue on with another week of our current word wall words. As a reminder:
just
away
came
after
little
We're also continuing our focus on the long and short sounds for the vowel e. This is a tricky one for kiddos. Point out the different spelling in long e words when you come upon them.
Mark Your Calendars:
Tuesday, January 27 First Graders will celebrate Half-Way Day! HOORAY!
Thursday, January 29 Bedtime Story Night 6:30-7:30
February 3 Jump Rope for Heart assembly: Be on the lookout for information regarding this Stormonth tradition!
February 9-13 Bus Driver Recognition Week: Thank a bus driver!
February 11: Early Release/Conferences
February 12: Lockdown drill practice in the building
Conferences in the evening
February 16: NO SCHOOL/Conferences
February 26: Jump Rope for Heart event
March 9: Ivy & Bean field trip to Sharon Lynne Wilson Center for the Arts
March 11: Irish Dancers performance here at Stormonth
March 28: Spring Break begins
Thank you for stopping by!
Michelle
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