October 5-9

Hello Families!
Our week included picture day as well as celebrations for the money we raised during the Scholastic Book Fair and for reaching a BUG milestone! Popsicles were delivered to all of Stormonth's students on Friday after lunch for surpassing our fundraising goal. We're so delighted to have helped a school in need! We also celebrated earning 1,000 BUGS for "Being Unusually Good" this year! This meant 1,000 seconds in our classroom of free choice activities. Some of us chose to watercolor, while others chose to play "POP!" to practice our sight words!

Here's what the rest of our week entailed...
Writer's Workshop: This week we revisited unfreezing our characters. We also sang an old favorite song together: The Itsy Bitsy Spider! This helped us learn another way to bring our stories to life: Telling them in itsy bitsy steps!

Here we are telling our small moment stories to our partners by telling them in small steps across our fingers...

Here's Maizie showing Allison how she wrote her story
bit by bit.

We also talked about how we can capture small moments when they happen and put them in our imaginary pocket until we have time to write them. When we pull them out of our pockets, we can tell them across our fingers. We found out that many of our stories are now 4 and 5 pages long with lots of details! Another way to add those details  and bring our stories to life is by bringing what's inside out.

Kevin Henkes did a GREAT job of bringing
the inside out in his story A Weekend
With Wendell. Ask your first grader
to tell you all about it!

We thought about our feelings and what we were thinking during the small moment. On Friday we turned into actors! We acted out our small moments with a partner and, boy, did this help us to add so much more to our stories! They are really coming to life! Here we are acting out our small moment stories...

Kendia even used a prop! The green unifix cube
represented her frog in her small moment.

In Reader's Workshop this week we continued to learn more ways to help us when we come to tricky words. We learned that we ALWAYS need to think about the meaning of the text: Does it make sense? We learned to double-check our reading by asking: Does it look right? Does it sound right? Does it make sense? It takes a lot of persistence, but we were up to the challenge because, just like The Little Engine Who Could, readers don't give up - they try, try and try again! On Friday we had a look at the vowels and a couple of our consonants. Talk about tricky! They make many different sounds! Sometimes we need to try a word two (or three!) different ways before we get it right. Here are some friends demonstrating how they solved these tricky words...

We did a terrific job practicing all of these strategies with our partners this week, and they were such helpful partners to me while I modeled getting stuck on tricky words! They encouraged me every step of the way!

Word Wall Words this week were:

as

they

saw

his 

with

Next week's words will be:

be

this

have

from

here

Our writers are always sure to have their writing folders
open to their 1st Grade Word Wall Words when they
write. Each week we highlight the new words we are
learning to read and spell and make sure we spell these correctly
in our writing. We're even noticing words we haven't focused
on yet!

We completed unit 1 in math. Unit 1 tests were sent home on Friday. Please review your child's with him/her and celebrate your first grader's hard work during our first unit, then send it back to school on Monday. Thank you! It would be helpful for some of our kiddos to be reminded to ALWAYS CHECK THEIR WORK - REALLY CHECK IT! Some friends were sad to see some errors that they knew the answer to. In unit 2 we'll be exploring  addition and subtraction strategies.

In science this week we learned about our weather recording routines which will begin next week. We'll be observing wind speed using a 0, 1, 2 scale - ask your first grader to tell you what each number means - cloud cover, and precipitation. Soon we'll add in reading the temperature on a thermometer.

Next week begins Star of the Week! We'll be learning more about Rohan! Sparky made it just in time this afternoon to go home with Rohan for the week. We can't wait to hear all about Rohan's home fire safety plan!

Until then...

Michelle

Mark Your Calendars:

October 14th & 28th: Early Release Days

October 22nd, 23rd and 28th: Parent/Teacher Conferences

Friday, October 23rd: NO SCHOOL for STUDENTS

October 30th: Costume Parade & Classroom Celebration

The first and third Fridays of the month are Stormonth Spirit Wear days!

November 11th & 25th: Early Release Days

November 24th: Music Performance
November 26th & 27th:
Thanksgiving Holiday

December 9th: Early Release Day

December 23rd-January 3rd: Winter Break