April 20-24

Hello Families!

Here's a sneak peek at the past week in first grade: 

We spent Tuesday morning busy with some Earth Day learning! In reader's workshop we explored our latest Scholastic News issue "Bag or Jellyfish?" and learned about how our choices affect the environment. Ask your first grader to tell you what happens in these scenarios: 

1. Throw the plastic bag on the ground.

2. Throw the plastic bag in the trash.

3. Recycle the plastic bag.

An even better option would be not to take the plastic bag at all and instead use a reusable bag when you go shopping!

Speaking of which, I hope many of you have been busy during the week checking your child's "Love the Earth Report Card." Please be sure to return this on Monday, April 27th.

On Wednesday, Earth Day, all of the first graders made a difference right here at Stormonth by cleaning up the grounds in the front of our building. Well done! 

Here we are in our Earth Day crowns with the trash we collected outside. We decided that since our trash bag wasn't full, we would just dump the trash into our classroom trash bag and save this larger bag for another time. 

After all, we now know what can happen to these trash bags!

Our time spent with the Scholastic News issue lead right into writer's workshop that day. We created a fun Earth Day project  where we wrote about how we can take care of the Earth. Hopefully the kiddos were inspired to make the world a better place every day by being conscious of what they're doing. 

For the rest of the week in reader's workshop we continued to focus on reading across genres to learn about our topics. In writer's workshop we continued to work on our nonfiction teaching books.

In math we have begun our geometry unit. We have started with telling time to the hour. Ask your first grader how s/he remembers which hand is the hour hand and which is the minute hand. We also created a class book called Time in Our Day where we each selected a time to the hour, wrote it in digital form, then drew a picture and wrote about what we do at that time. It would be very helpful for your first grader to begin focusing on clocks/time outside of school. During the upcoming week we'll begin telling time to the half hour. 

Critter Crunch was a big hit this week! Thank you for supporting the 4th grade's project to raise funds for the Wisconsin Wildlife Rehabilitation Center. 

In science this week we created compost bags with soil, the organic matter we brought from home and some special guests: red worms all the way from California! We'll be observing our bags over the next several weeks. For now, they're tucked away in a dark cupboard so that the worms can get busy!

 One of our bags doesn't have any worms in it. That way we can see what effects the worms have on the organic matter and soil.

It was a fun-filled week!

Thanks for stopping by the blog.

Michelle Mullen 

Mark your calendars: 

April 29: Early Release

May 13: Early Release

May 25: Memorial Day holiday

May 27: Early Release

May 28: Schlitz Audubon field trip

June 4: Lion King musical production 

June 5: Travel to BMS in the morning to see their musical production

June 10: Tentative date for first grade's "Show & Share" family picnic

June 12: Last day of first grade

April 6-10

Welcome back! Everyone returned to school with lots to share about their time away with friends and family. It was especially fun to hear about all of the traveling that our friends did! As for me, I was glad to have time to read two wonderful books and get one of our bathrooms painted.
 Bloom: Finding Beauty in the Unexpected by Kelle Hampton is one of the books I read, and it comes highly recommended!

Here's a sneak peek at our week together:

Prior to beginning our new writing unit, we wrote a letter to our grownups telling them about our opinion writing unit. We wrote about what we learned, what our favorite piece was and why and about our writing goals as we move into our next unit. 

On Tuesday our writers were asked to think about something that they could teach someone and write about it. This was a pre-assessment for our new unit. These pieces are helping to guide my individual conferences with your children as they let me know what they already know about informational writing and what they need to learn and strengthen. Many of the kiddos already know a great deal and even put chapters in their first pieces - wow! 

We officially began our new unit on Wednesday and are off and running! Ideas for this unit can sometimes be difficult to come up with, so on Friday your child came home with an idea sheet that I would like you to help him/her with. Please return these on Monday, April 13th. After our first day of writing our teaching books, we had a look at  a kindergarten writing checklist for informational writing. We then looked at our work with a partner and showed our partner all of the things we already know about informational writing by comparing it to the kindergarten checklist. 

On Friday, one of our friends shared her teaching book with us, and we talked about all of the things she did to make this a very informative teaching book.

We also began our new Reader's Workshop unit this week: Reading Across Genres to Learn About a Topic. Each of our readers has decided on a topic that fascinates them and shopped for books across several different genres. We thought about what we already know about our topic and then made a list of things we wonder about our topic. We discovered that we can even find facts about our topic in fictional texts if we're being really good detectives! We've begun collecting these facts and sharing them with our partners. We've also begun collecting new vocabulary as we're "growing our vocabulary!"

In math this week we continued our look at data analysis, focusing on comparison bars. We learned a great trick this week: when we read comparison problems, it's a REALLY good idea to circle the word "fewer" or more as well as the number next to it if there is one. This number then goes in the circle next to the smaller comparison bar. If there isn't a number next to fewer or more, then we know a question mark goes in the circle and that's our unknown. Next week we'll finish up our data analysis unit, take our unit assessment then move onto our new unit: Geometry, Measurement & Equal Shares. 

After a review of our science unit on matter, we explored matter in a delicious way - ROOT BEER FLOATS! YUMMMM! 

Mark your calendars: 

April 15: Early Release (& Tax Day!)

April 20: NO SCHOOL. Professional Development Day for Staff

April 22: Earth Day

April 29: Early Release

May 13: Early Release

May 25: Memorial Day holiday

May 27: Early Release

May 28: Schlitz Audubon field trip

June 4: Lion King musical production 

June 10: Tentative date for first grade's "Show & Share" family picnic

June 12: Last day of first grade

March 23-27

Hello Families!

I hope this finds you enjoying the last couple days of your spring break. Our week in first grade prior to break was chock-full of goodness. Here's a sneak peek...

In math we began unit 6 where we'll be describing, organizing, and representing data. We began focusing on comparison problems and comparison statements, and our first graders are doing a remarkable job with this new learning! 

Speaking of math, on Monday the first grade teacher team met all day to focus on math. Mrs. Miller was our guest teacher, and was lucky enough to be with us on game day! This was our 2,000-seconds acknowledgement for B.U.G. behavior! Here we are enjoying this fun time together:

During writing this week, we finished up our book reviews.For our final celebration, we used what we know about reading to an audience (which we've been learning during Reader's Workshop) to present our best book review to our classmates. This, of course, was preceded by practicing this skill with our peers. 

Here we are practicing and receiving feedback so that we would know 

what we did well and what we could work on a bit more: 

 

I created a private youtube account so that you can see your book reviewers on video! Here's the link to our reviews: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0jinF9uY9t2_yig6vN_Fbw
Enjoy listening to and seeing your fabulous book reviewers!

During science this week our experiment was called "Gas in a Bag!" Ask your first grader to tell you about our experiment. What solids and liquids did we use? How did we use our senses to make our observations? What happened when we put the solid and the liquid in the bag? WHY did this happen? Let me tell you, it was pretty darn exciting!

 

 

And, finally, spring break calls for some spring cleaning, so we spent the last 20 minutes of our day doing just that. But, it wasn't just your typical spring cleaning; we made it FUN! Shaving cream does the trick when you want to get marker, crayon, pencil, etc. off of desks, so we took FULL advantage!

Thanks for stopping by!

Michelle Mullen

Mark Your Calendars...

April 7: Referendum VOTE. Please check the district website tab titled 

Referendum Update for more information about the referendum. 

April 15: Early Release

April 29: Early Release

May 13: Early Release

May 25: Memorial Day holiday

May 27: Early Release

May 28: Schlitz Audubon field trip

June 4: Lion King musical production 

June 10: Tentative date for first grade's "Show & Share" family picnic

June 12: Last day of first grade