May 23-27

Hello Families!
This was our last full week of first grade, and now we're down to just EIGHT school days in first grade together with still so much ahead! Here's a sneak-peek at our past week...

In Writer's Workshop we've been busy with our character book series. Areas of focus have been on elaborating, using our "Super Powers" to work with greater independence, using punctuation to give orders to our readers, and using illustrations to tell important details. We also created boxes for our book series. You'll get to see these and read our stories at our Family Picnic on Thursday, June 2nd, but here's a peek at some of them:

In Reader's Workshop we've been keeping life lessons in mind by paying attention to how characters change during a story. We noticed that when a character's feelings change, this is oftentimes when a lesson is learned. We worked together in partnerships to group our books by the lessons they teach and also checked in on our goals as readers. 

In Math Workshop we learned about nickels, dimes and quarters. We supported and extended our learning with many hands-on learning opportunities with our peers as well as independently on our Chromebooks.

We're incredibly excited for all that the next two weeks hold in store for us! Until then...

Michelle Mullen

Mark Your Calendars: 

May 31: K5 Friends visit 1st grade at 9:00am!

June 2:    FAMILY PICNIC 11:30-1:00pm
*Please be sure to let me know 
if you're unable to attend our Family Picnic 
so that I can plan for your child to join another family. 
Talent Show 2-3:30pm

June 3: Special Interest Day  12:40-3:15
Spirit Day (wear Stormonth gear/colors)

June 6: We'll celebrate Iris' summer birthday

Talent Show 9:50-10:50

North Shore Fire Department/Sparky here to visit 3:15pm

June 7th: We'll celebrate Lucia's summer birthday

June 7th: Volunteer Breakfast in the Board Room 8-9am (please RSVP) followed by our assembly at 9am

June 8th: We'll celebrate Allison's summer birthday

June 9th: Last day of First Grade

Field Day 1-3pm: The Field Day Committee is looking for volunteers for this special event!

SEE YOU LATER, SECOND GRADER!

 

May 16-20

Hello Families!
What a fun week! We've been busy learning a song for our Family Picnic on June 2 and a farewell song that we'll be singing to Mrs. Campbell and Mrs. Gianopolis at our end of the year assembly on June 7th. End of the year assessments are being conducted as well for Words Their Way, word wall (reading/writing all 78 words), and fact fluency. In addition to all of that, we continue on with our learning across all subject areas. We're a busy crew! Here's a sneak peek at our week:

During Writer's Workshop we continue to write stories for our character book series. Our cereal boxes are all here and ready to be decorated. Thanks so much for sending those in right away! Our focus during mini-lessons has been on adding details, telling step by step, planning, and making sure our stories have a beginning, middle (trouble), and end (problem solved). A great way for us to organize these three parts is to give each a chapter title, so we're also busy coming up with catchy chapter titles for our books.

Reader's Workshop is working hand-in-hand with writing: what we do in one area supports learning in the other. Our focus this past week has been on becoming our book characters by paying attention to the clues the author leaves us. Ask your first grader to share some of these clues with you. 

We're really getting to know the characters in our books, so we spent time introducing our characters to our reading partners. We talked about what they like/dislike, what they do, and if  we would want to be friends with them and why. Finally, we talked about how stories are like fortune cookies; when you open up a story, you find there's a little life lesson inside. We paid close attention to these lessons and shared them with each other. Ask your reader to share a life lesson with you that s/he learned from a book. 

In math workshop we've begun our money unit. Throughout the unit the kiddos will be involved in three math rotations each day that develop their understanding of money through hands-on activities. Here are some that we experienced this week:

You can visit the website www.abcya.com to find fun and interactive games that help your child to learn about money!

Grab & Graph

Sorting coins by heads & tails.

Friends playing a game called Four in a Row.

Pinch & Total

In science this week we carefully dumped the contents of our compost bags. WOW! There were so many changes! Ask your scientist to tell you all about the changes in his/her compost bag. 

Finally, our Music Mini-Concert was on Friday. What a joy it was for me to see your kiddos perform! They're such a wonderful little crew! It's events like these that get me all verklemt... I sure am going to miss them! 

That's all for this week!

Until next time...

Michelle Mullen

Mark Your Calendars: 

May 25: Early Release Day

May 30: No School

June 2: FAMILY PICNIC 11:30-1:00pm

June 6: We'll celebrate Iris' summer birthday

June 7th: We'll celebrate Lucia's summer birthday

June 7th: Volunteer Breakfast in the Board Room 8-9am (please RSVP) followed by our assembly at 9am

June 8th: We'll celebrate Allison's summer birthday

June 9th: Last day of First Grade
Field Day 1-3pm: The Field Day Committee is looking for volunteers for this special event!

SEE YOU LATER, SECOND GRADER!
 

May 9-13

This is Mrs. Mullen's character Elizabeth. Ask your first grader to tell you about her!

Hello Families!
What a fun week we've had welcoming many new friends to our classroom! New friends you say? Yes, and here's a sneak peek!

We've begun our character units in both reading and writing, and we're getting to know characters in the books we're reading and the characters we're writing about during Writer's Workshop. We're doing a lot of thinking about our imaginary characters. Ask your first grader to tell you about his/her character's name, age, likes/dislikes, friends, favorite color, favorite things to do, etc. Hopefully they'll have LOTS of information to provide you! Ask them, too, about the adventures their character is going on. These should be REALISTIC and should include a problem and a solution. On Friday we spent time talking about dialog, and it was really helpful for us to draw pictures of our characters - then they could actually use them to act out dialog! 

During Reader's Workshop we've been reading independently and with partners and learning about the characters in our books by rereading, noticing their relationships with other characters, introducing the characters to our partners, and connecting parts of the story together. We've also been using "stop and jot" to help us remember important parts of our books and to help us remember character traits. 

Our last guidance lesson was this week, so we surprised Mrs. Geinopolis with thank you cards. Your kiddos wrote such sweet and specific notes to her - I was all teary-eyed reading them! Mrs. G has really had a positive impact on your kiddos, and we've been so lucky to learn from her. She'll be missed!

We took part in the Pedestrian Safety program on Tuesday and had a great time learning in the Safety Village and outside while crossing the street together. Thank you to our volunteers Katie McGregor and Ruchita Varma for joining us!

 

 

During Math Workshop this week we continued to explore different strategies to solve double-digit addition. Common errors I've noted are kiddos forgetting to line up the ones and tens properly and forgetting to add the extra ten. We also completed our addition and subtraction fact fluency checks. As a reminder, it is a first grade goal that your child knows addition/subtraction facts within 10 fluently, or automatically. They should be able to write down the answer within 3 seconds. When kiddos know these facts fluently, it frees up their brain to focus on more challenging math material. This will be very important that they have this in place as they enter second grade. If your child is not yet fluent with the facts through ten I strongly encourage practice with them throughout the summer. 

Many of our friends prefer to use the "Show All Totals" strategy.

In Science this week we planted cucumber seeds in three types of soil: sand, clay and humus. We made predictions about what will happen. Ask your first grader what s/he thinks will happen and why. We also planted seeds in open tubes so that we'll be able to observe the root structures later on.

We carefully added water to our open tubes.

Once the water began to drip out of the bottom of the tube, we stopped.

We planted seeds in humus, sand and clay.

A Note of Thanks:
Thank you to the families who donated tissues this week. We have plenty now to help us get through this last month of first grade. We appreciate your helping hands!


Here are some important reminders...

Your child should have come home with a note on Friday, May 13th requesting that they bring coins from home for our final math unit: Money. They need:
10 pennies
10 nickels
5 dimes
4 quarters
*Please send by Tuesday, May 17th. Thank you!



Please RSVP for the Volunteer Breakfast

Book Orders are due on Friday, May 20th. When you order online, you can order from any catalog - not just the two I sent home. There are TONS of great deals on terrific books. This is a great opportunity to stock up on summer reading (see the orange section below). 


If you didn't turn in your child's Progress Report envelope after our last marking period, please do so ASAP. I'm missing quite a few. Thanks!


Your first grader should continue to read daily at home and return his/her reading log each morning. Developing this habit now will benefit your child greatly. We've been talking so much about our reading brain being a muscle, and when we don't use it we don't grow as a reader. This will be extremely important during the summer months. During the summer, find time to visit your local library, have your child read daily, be sure your child sees you reading for different purposes, and continue to read to him/her daily as well and have conversations about the books you're reading. Include both fiction and nonfiction in your child's literary diet. The gift of reading is one that lasts a lifetime!

A Request:
We'll be setting up a store as part of our money unit. If you have any trinkets around the house that you're looking to get rid of, please send them our way. We'd love to put them in our store! Thank you!

Until next time...
Michelle Mullen

Mark Your Calendars: 

May 20: Music Mini-Concert 1:50-2:20

May 25: Early Release Day

May 30: No School

June 2: FAMILY PICNIC 11:30-1:00pm

June 6: We'll celebrate Iris' summer birthday

June 7th: We'll celebrate Lucia's summer birthday

June 7th: Volunteer Breakfast in the Board Room 8-9am (please RSVP) followed by our assembly at 9am

June 8th: We'll celebrate Allison's summer birthday

June 9th: Last day of First Grade
Field Day 1-3pm: The Field Day Committee is looking for volunteers for this special event!

SEE YOU LATER, SECOND GRADER!