Having a HOOT in Mrs. Mullen's First Grade!: September 28

Dear Families,
Thank you ever so much! Just look at all the books we added to our classroom library! We're so excited to listen to them and get our hands/eyes/minds on them! I received many wonderful donations from many of our friends, and then purchased more titles with the $56.02 our class raised during the coin drive. OH HAPPY DAY!

On to our week...

In writer's workshop this week we talked about how we read our writing like we read our books. As we're reading our small moment stories and see/hear a mistake, we stop right away and fix it up! We each received our own personal word wall to keep in our writing folders. The first five words we learned were already highlighted, so our writers were in charge of highlighting this week's words. We'll do this with each passing week so that we know which words we are responsible for spelling correctly in our writing. We used our word wall to help us with our fix-ups (editing). We also found that we needed to do some revising if we wanted to add to our story or take something out. All of this was preparing us for our Gallery Walk on Wednesday. After creating a frame for our work, we placed our first writing piece of the year side-by-side with the piece we fixed up.

Preparing our work for our Gallery Walk.

More preparations for our Gallery Walk.

Our two writing pieces are side by side on our frames
and ready for our Gallery Walk!

Then we all walked quietly around the gallery to read each other's work. We paid close attention to how our friends have grown as writers then shared those ideas after our Gallery Walk.

Here is what some of our writers had to say about their fellow writers:

"Her first piece was only a 1-page story. Now all three pages are filled up!"

"I can read her writing now."

"The first story had scribbles on it, but now there aren't any scribbles and he wrote it just right!"

"His first story had blank pages. Now he has a 4-page story."

"I noticed more punctuation."

"He has more words on each page."

"There was only a beginning in her first story. In her new story,

all the pages are filled up and there is a happy ending."

In reader's workshop this week we talked about dropping bad habits and picking up good habits instead. What a fun time they had with this! Ask your first grader all about it! We also looked at more ways to tackle tricky words...

Have your first grader explain how readers can use these strategies.

During our partner time, we learned that partners can be the teacher. Reading partners don't just sit there and listen to their partners read - they have an important job to do! We have to help our partners use good habits before, during, and after they read. We used these signs to help us be the teacher...

Here we are being the teacher with our partners...

This week's word wall words: are, for, on, was, where
Here we are practicing our new words with the game Roll, Read & Write...

Here are this week's Queens...

We thought of more words with the -ai pattern in them.
Ask your first grader about them.

We noticed that sometimes a makes an /u/ sound
like at the end of Ava!

Allison has a lot of words in her name! Ask your first grader about them.

We noticed Kendia's name has the word end in it
and the word pattern -en. We made a list of -en words.
Ask your first grader about them.

Now that our King and Queen routine is done, we'll be adding Keyboarding and Handwriting to our daily routines!

Our math work this week focused on partners of 6, 7, and 8. This is helping us to build our addition and subtraction fact fluency! Thanks to those of you who have been having your first grader get on Dreambox at home to support your child in his/her math development!

On Friday in Science we learned about what a meteorologist does. Then we tried our hand at observing the weather. Here we are outside using four of our senses to make and record our weather observations...