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.
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
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