Having a HOOT in Mrs. Mullen's First Grade!: February 9-13

It was another milestone week in first grade - the 100th day! And yes, indeed, we are all 100 DAYS SMARTER! During our morning meeting, we all shared ways that we are smarter. I hope that during our conferences you were able to see all the ways listed on our "100 Days" bulletin board.

Here's a sneak-peek at our week:
Writer's Workshop: Part of our time this week was spent judging our classmates' collections and deciding if we agreed or disagreed with the item they thought was the best one. We then had to support our opinion with several reasons and LOTS of details. We learned about using "sparkle" words such as adorable instead of just cute. Here are some of our collections with our written opinions:

And here are some of our agreements and disagreements:

This week we also worked with our writing partners to show them the places in our writing where we wrote an opinion and the places where we had details to support that opinion. Our partners helped us out by providing their own opinions. Some of us used those as a way to make our writing stronger by "quoting an expert."

We enjoyed some time with our K4 Book Buddies on our early release day. We got to know them a bit better by interviewing them about things they love. We then helped them to create a cupcake-shaped book to take home and share with their families Of course, our time with them wouldn't be complete without showing off our developing reading skills, too!

Reader's Workshop: We continue to discuss word solving strategies during Reader's Workshop. During one of our lessons, we shared with a partner all of the strategies we use quite a bit, and then set a goal to use others more. It has been great to see kiddos have these charts with them during guided reading and see that they are employing their goal strategy (ies) when they come to tricky words. Please help to remind your reader to go back and reread the entire sentence when they need to stop to fix up a word. This second time through should sound fluent - just as if they were having a conversation with someone.

Math Workshop: During math workshop we made connections between facts we know like 4+3=7 and 40+30=70. We know that four ones plus three ones equals seven. We then know that 4 tens plus 3 tens equals 7 tens. During the week, we also learned strategies to help us count on into the next decade when adding a two-digit number and a single digit number. We also used the <, > and = symbols to compare double-digit numbers.

Valentine's Day: Thanks so much for the donations for our Valentine's Day celebration. We had a great time decorating cookies, passing out and reading our valentines, and playing Vowel Bingo!