Having a HOOT in Mrs. Mullen's First Grade!: February 8-12

One of our friends brought this wonderful book to share this week. We LOVED it!

Hello Families!
I hope this finds you all staying warm in the midst of this deep freeze! We had a busy week wrapped in love! Here it is from beginning to end...

In Writer's Workshop we finished up our opinions about our collections in small groups on Monday.

This slide began the excitement about writing reviews!

On Tuesday we began writing reviews to persuade others. We have been thinking about restaurants, movies, games, toys, etc. that we know well and have been writing reviews about them - what fun! Each reviewer received a Tiny Topics Notebook to collect his/her ideas.

Please help your writer to think of more movies, toys, restaurants, museums, waterparks, etc. that s/he can review!

Your writers are SO engaged with this writing, and boy is it ever fun to witness! We read a couple of reviews by young writers and had a look at what they did to convince their readers. We also listened to a couple first graders share their book reviews. Next, we gave those strategies a try in our own writing.

A first grader reads her review of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.

Another writer reads her review about My Life as a Chicken.

We also learned about how in our reviews we should imagine that our reader is right there, and we're talking right to them! We pretended to be radio announcers while sharing our plan for our review. Here we are practicing with our friends:

We added to our reviews by making comparisons. For example, one of our reviewers was writing a review of Key Lime Cove and told why it was better than Blue Harbor. We shared our writing with our partners and got some suggestions right on the spot for how to make our reviews even more convincing!

We even talked about how we can talk back in a friendly way to others who disagree with our opinions:

In Reader's Workshop, we've been busy talking about ways to understand our books. Here's our anchor chart of strategies we've focused on so far:

We're also focusing on fluent reading by using all that we know about solving tricky words to get the job done quickly! We listened closely to a first grader read a book review and a dad read a chapter from Frog and Toad to his daughter. We created a chart of what we noticed that these readers did while they were reading. Here's what we noticed:

Now we're practicing these skills every time we read in preparation for being reading stars for an audience! We'll be recording ourselves reading one of our book reviews which we'll begin writing in the next couple weeks! Our book reviews will be posted on our blog for our grown-ups to read, and we'll also post QR codes with the link to our book reviews on the bulletin board outside our classroom for an even wider audience! We're SO EXCITED!

We completed unit 4 in math and completed our unit assessment. I have to say, I was mighty impressed by how well everyone performed on this test. They did a great job of demonstrating some pretty hefty learning from this unit! Next, we began unit 5. Our first lesson really challenged us, so we'll be taking 2 days for it. Homework for 5.1 came home on Thursday. We'll be doing part 2 of the lesson on Tuesday, and on that day a set of purple Make a Ten cards which were explained in the parent letter that also came home on Thursday will come home. Those will be your child's homework. Please KEEP THESE AT HOME TO PRACTICE WITH.

Making a 10 to find the unknown partner.

Our word study focus this week was on short and long /o/. Next week's vowel focus will be short and long /e/ and our word wall words will be:

our

mother

come

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! XOXO

Friday afternoon we celebrated Valentine's Day by decorating Valentine bags, decorating cookies, playing Valentine math games, reading our Valentines, and watching A Charlie Brown Valentine. What a fun, relaxing time together and great way to end our week. Thanks to everyone who was able to donate to our celebration - we LOVE you!