Having a HOOT in Mrs. Mullen's First Grade!: February 2-6

Hello Families!
This week we wrapped up our work with our Realistic Fiction units in writing and reading. Here are just a few of the books we looked at very closely this week to discover what type of person the character was.

We proved our thinking by going back into the story and finding evidence. We discovered that more often than not, we need to use all of the clues that an author gives us to truly determine what type of person that character is. In other words, we need to make inferences based on what the author DOES tell us.

After finishing up these units, we began our persuasive/opinion writing study by studying our collections very closely. First we had to judge our collections...

We watched a 2-minute segment of a dog show to see how carefully the judges decided on which dog is the best. Then a friend helped to judge MY collection of dogs! She decided the Saint Bernard was the best. Here she is lining the dogs up, comparing them, and then telling us WHY the Saint Bernard was her first place winner.

Then we worked hard to convince our reader...

Here we are judging our own collections:

Now we're focused on not only including reasons, but including a lot of details for EACH reason. Ask your opinion writer about what we discovered when we highlighted my opinion piece with yellow for the reasons and green for the details. Which color was there more of? Why was that?

In Reader's Workshop we are focusing on how we can be our own teachers by using all of the strategies we know when we come to tricky words. Each day we're highlighting a strategy. I'm using texts from our guided reading lessons with strategies that the kiddos actually used. This makes for some very meaningful teaching and allows your reader to be in the "Strategy Spotlight" by sharing this good work under the HoverCam! In this example, we had a look at two strategies. Our reader was having a tricky time with the word hands, but then he quickly noticed the word "and" in it. This helped him to solve it on the run. He then cross-checked to be sure it looked right, sounded right and made sense. In the second example, our reader was having a tricky time with the word barked. He first thought about what was happening in the story - a bird was about to eat Danny's worm! Danny is trying to get the bird to go away. Danny is a dog... barked! Again, he cross-checked to be sure it looked right, sounded right and made sense. In all of our strategy work, we link everything to MEANING, and I encourage you to do the same at home. Be sure they cross check that it makes sense. Have your first grader show you our movement for checking to see if it

looks right, sounds right and makes sense.

We completed our word wall assessment on all 78 of our words and also completed a vowel assessment. I will share this information with you at conferences. This will help me in determining next steps for your first grader during

whole class, small group and individual word work times.

In science this week we mixed three different solids with a liquid - water. Ask your first grader to share with you what the three solids were and what s/he discovered.