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!