November 16-20

Hello Families!
Thank you for stopping by the blog. We hope you enjoy our recap...

In Writer's Workshop, we continue to work on our How-To pieces. We found we can use labels in our pictures to help teach the reader even more. Writing catchy conclusions was another focus. We also learned how important it is to use exact words to describe the actions the reader will need to do. This was even more apparent on Thursday when partners acted out each other's directions! Here we are acting out our stories together... 

"Put the dish cloth and the soap in the sink." OOPS! Amiah and Harrison discovered that they needed to revise their How-To directions!

This How-To writer discovered that he needed to add 3 more steps to his piece, and he indicated this with his "+ + + ."

This How-To writer discovered that she needed to use more clear directions, and she indicated this with "*."

After acting out our How-To books, we worked together to make some revisions. 

During Reader's Workshop this past week we have launched our Nonfiction unit of study. Here we are taking time to slowly explore our new books and learn about our topics even before we read!

We're finding that many of the strategies we learned during our fiction unit are just as important when reading nonfiction. We focused on taking sneak peeks and found that we can learn SO MUCH even before we begin reading! Nonfiction readers need to slow down to focus on photographs and captions and spend time with each page.

We spent a lot of time with the book Hang On, Monkey! this week. We learned so much from the words, pictures and captions.

We're lucky to have our reading partners by our side so that we can learn even more by chatting with each other about our learning.

During Math Workshop this week we have been focusing on solving and creating subtraction number stories by using different strategies. 

In science this past week, we have been busy each morning observing our puddles we created last week. We added our daily observations to our puddle books. Slowly each day our puddles disappeared!

Ask your first grader to explain to you what happened to the water in our puddles.

We learned on Friday that it wasn't magic... it was EVAPORATION! This lead us to our lesson about the Water Cycle and a project to demonstrate our understanding. 

Ask your first grader to explain the water cycle to you.

Thanks to everyone who was able to donate to our annual food drive! Our class donated 18 items toward the school total of 1,295! 

Thank you for your donations!

We're so excited for our concert next week! The kiddos have been having an amazing time practicing with our artists in residence, School of Rock!

Until then...

Michelle Mullen

Mark Your Calendars:

November 24th: Concert Performances at 10am and 2pm

November 25th: Early Release Day & First Grade's Thanksgiving Celebration

November 26th & 27th:

Thanksgiving Holiday

November 30th: BOOK ORDERS DUE. Please take advantage of the many great deals on Scholastic's high-quality books.

December 9th: Early Release Day

December 23rd-January 3rd: Winter Break

November 9-13

Hello Families!
Here's a sneak peek at another great week...

In Writer's Workshop we continued to learn about writing how-to pieces. We found that one of the strategies we learned during our Small Moments unit fits in very well with How-To writing: ZOOMING in on small topics. So instead of writing a book called "How To Train Your Dog," you could instead ZOOM in and focus on one aspect of that training. For example, "How to Teach Your Dog To Sit." 

We looked again at How to Wash a Wooly Mammoth and paid close attention to the introduction. We noticed that in this book and in others, the author includes an INTERESTING INTRODUCTION where s/he introduces him/herself to the reader and lets the reader know what s/he will teach them. 

We also spent time looking at time order words in the beginning, middle and end of our mentor texts. We're adding to our growing list of transition words each day! This lesson harkened back to our Small Moment writing again by showing us how important it is to plan our How-To pieces across our fingers as well!

Another skill we learned was about how we need to think about WHO our reading AUDIENCE is. I gave them the example of  writing a piece called "How to Make a Bed." I would write it differently depending on who my audience/reader was. For example, I wouldn't tell Mr. Mullen to first take all of the stuffed animals off of the bed, but if I were writing the how-to piece for my daughters I would need to tell them that! We got a good chuckle out of that! It's helpful for us to visualize the person we're writing to as well and even pretend they are right there, and we are talking to them. 

Finally, we talked about how How-To writers use an "in charge" teaching voice. We went back and reread pieces we finished to see if we used an in charge teaching voice. If we didn't, we revised a bit!

In Reader's Workshop this week we continued to develop our understanding of plot, retelling, partner work/expectations, all with a focus on the importance of paying attention to the clues the author gives us about characters so that we can get to know them better. We also talked about how important it is for us to pay attention to the setting of the story. Sometimes the setting changes, and if we don't pay attention to that, it can impact our understanding of the story.

In math this week we worked really hard at solving equations with unknown partners! This can be a bit tricky! We also worked on writing our own unknown partner stories. Again, TRICKY! For one of our lessons, we solved missing partner pancake stories. How fun it was for a couple of our first grade friends to see their second grade friends on our slides - especially Willy whose second friend Willy (yes, the same name!) moved to Japan! 

We learned about a mom named Kayla who is a veteran (ask your first grader what a veteran is) in our latest issue of Scholastic News. We also used a letter to a veteran as one of our morning messages this week. There were many mistakes that we needed to fix up! What great editors we are getting to be! 

Mrs. Geinopolos joined us on Friday to discuss PEER PRESSURE. Ask your first grader to tell you all about it!

One of our morning seatwork activities is practice with reading the poems in our poetry folders as well as practicing our word wall words. This is one way to improve our fluency. Here's one of our friends busy at work: 

In science this week we talked about how, just like there are wind flags to estimate wind speed and thermometers to measure
temperature, there are also rain gauges to measure rainfall. Next we created rain gauges which were simply plastic cups with straight sides and a scale attached to the outside. Our scale is based on unifix cubes. This way we'll be able to read the measurement on the same container in which it rains! We practiced reading our rain gauges when Mrs. Mullen pretended to be a rain cloud and poured water into our cups! 

After that, we took our rain gauges outside in the courtyard so we can begin collecting rain. We had a teachable moment when we saw a rain barrel out there. Everyone was curious about what it was!

One of our friends having a good look at our rain gauges. We hope the tiles and rock will keep our basket in place! It sure has been windy outside!

For the second part of our lesson, Mrs. Mullen showed us some water she has been collecting at home during the past week in her own rain gauge! We talked about what we thought happened to puddles; where does the rainwater go? We thought it would be fun to see if we can find out! We used Mrs. Mullen's rainwater as well as the water in our rain gauges and poured it into a pie tin then added food coloring so we could have a good look at the water. We recorded our steps in our Puddle Books. Next, we made predictions about what our puddles will look like on Monday. We'll record our data next week!

Each team has a puddle. Which one belongs to your first grader's team? Ask your first grader to predict what will happen to their puddle.



Finally, we read a story about a 5-year old who invented a new kind of umbrella! Ask your first grader to tell you what the problem was that lead to the invention and what the solution was.
I encouraged your scientists to give this some thought this weekend: If you could invent a new kind of umbrella, what would it look like? Perhaps some of our friends will draw their invention or even make a prototype! Then they could even write a How-To piece next week to teach someone how to make their umbrella invention!

Some of us were surprised with some notes in our backpacks on Friday afternoon. We had no idea who they were from - another mystery for us to solve. We also wondered why only some of us received a note and not others. Perhaps we could share our happiness with someone who wasn't so happy! We soon discovered that it was Mrs. Clement's second graders who left us the notes! Here's a video they shared with us as well:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwelE8yyY0U
We hope you might be inspired to share a kindness with someone else as well. Kindness is contagious - pass it on!

Next Week's Word Wall Words: 
here   how   if   will   too

Until next time!
Michelle


Mark Your Calendars:
Please help support our annual Food Drive! 
It runs from November 9-20

November 24th: Music Performance

November 25th: Early Release Day

November 26th & 27th:

Thanksgiving Holiday

December 9th: Early Release Day

December 23rd-January 3rd: Winter Break

November 2-6

Happy November! Can you believe it's already November? Thankfully we have been given a bit of an extended Indian Summer this past week - what a delightful week it was! Here's what we were up to in first grade:

 In Writer's Workshop we began our How-To writing unit. We began the unit with an independent how-to piece based on a writing prompt. These pieces are being used by me to help determine next steps in each child's development as a how-to writer. They'll also be used at the end of our unit so that we can see how much we've grown as how-to writers! Our next experience was a collaborative how-to piece about our pumpkin seed sorting experience last week. Next we tried our hand at our own how-to pieces. I'm so impressed with the work all of our writers are doing! We also created a Mudge art piece and completed this by following the steps on Mrs. Mullen's directed art how-to piece. We discovered that Mrs. Mullen left out some steps, so we needed to revise her piece so that it made sense to us as we created the project. We read several How-To books as well and for each talked about what craft moves we noticed that we'd like to try in our own writing.

We can learn a lot from mentor authors!

 On Friday, we created an anchor chart of many, many things we can teach others to do, because writers' lives are FULL of things they can teach! Help your first grader brainstorm ideas for how-to pieces that they can write. We found that it's helpful to think about our day from the beginning to the end. For example, in the morning I brush my teeth; I could teach someone how to do that! I'm an expert at it! 

In Readers' Workshop we talked about how readers are brave - they don't give up when they come to tricky words! We worked with a partner to read a new poem called November. When we got to tricky words, we didn't give up! We encouraged our partners to try many different strategies, always with a focus on meaning or "what makes sense." We focused on the importance of setting in stories and also discussed how we should name the characters by name when we retell our stories to someone. That way they know EXACTLY who we're talking about and they can understand the story, too. We worked with our partners to retell and filled out a checklist indicating whether or not we remembered all of the important parts of a retelling. On Friday we read the latest issue of Scholastic News which focused on Veteran's Day. We used key details in the text to answer questions about the article. 

In Math Workshop this week we further developed our understanding of how addition and subtraction are related. We also practiced more with understanding and writing vertical equations. 

In Science we practiced reading and writing temperatures. After that we completed The Water Mixing Experiement! Ask your first grader about all of the steps we needed to follow and what we discovered.

Ask your scientist to tell you about our results. What surprised us? Why? 

Our Words Their Way rotations are going very well! Check in with your first grader about what s/he is learning during this time. Some are working on blends, some on vowel patterns, and some on digraphs ch and sh. 

It was a fun week to recognize RED RIBBON WEEK! Here are just some of our CRAZY HAIR-DOS! Thank you for sending healthy snacks each day!

Next week's Word Wall Words: 

were

when

your

said

went

***This is a tricky group of words. I encourage you to have your first grader practice reading and writing these at home. Spelling City is a GREAT online site to do just that!

Until next time...

Michelle

Mark Your Calendars:
Please help support our annual Food Drive! 
It runs from November 9-20

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