January 5-9

Welcome back!

We were all so excited to be back together on Monday after our winter break. I hope you all enjoyed time with friends and family you hold dear! I wanted to share this photo to show you how close-knit this group is. This is what happened after one of our friends hurt her eye Friday morning and spent a long time in the health room. What an incredible group hug from all of her friends!

We continue to work on our realistic fiction stories in Writer's Workshop. Coming up with realistic stories about what could happen to our characters at Sunny Days School with their teacher Mrs. Readwell has taken center stage! We brainstormed a list of possible problems/solutions in a school setting. I'm willing to bet that one of our authors will write about what happened today during our science lesson. Let's just say digital cameras do not like to be dropped in pitchers of water...

We also talked a lot this week about the importance of planning our stories and discussed how we can do this in several different ways. Another day was spent writing a problem and solution for a story then telling our plan to a partner.

 
Partners then played "TAG." They TOLD one thing that they really liked about each other's story. Then they ASKED each other a question or two about their story. Finally, they GAVE each other some advice. These steps are helpful to our writers as they assist them in making sure that their story has a beginning/middle/end, problem/solution, and that they have told it step by step. It also helps them to perhaps think about their story in a new way. 

A note came home Friday requesting an empty cereal box from home. We'll be using these for our boxed set book collections! The kiddos will decorate them once all of the cereal boxes are here,  and then our authors will begin filling them with each story about their character. 

In reader's workshop we began our "Getting to Know Our Characters" unit. It's really nice when our writing and reading units align with each other, as it makes for some very powerful teaching and learning. Our lessons focused on getting to know our characters by paying attention to their actions, likes, and dislikes; noticing how the characters change from the beginning to the end of the story; and predicting what we think will happen based on what we know about the character. We also began our workshop rotations thanks to all of my Scholastic bonus points which allowed me to purchase a "boom box" for our listening station! The kiddos got quite a kick out of the cassettes! 

Ask your child what s/he does during each rotation:

Read to Self/Reading Journals

Partner Reading

Guided Reading

Listen to Reading

Computers

In math, we learned a new game called "Sea a 10." The kiddos had a blast with this! Each player flips a fish. As soon as someone sees numbers that add to 10 they call out, "I see 10!" Whoever says it first gets the cards. 

But watch out! If you flip a shark, you lose all of your fish! 

Next, we finished up our Contexts for Learning: The Double Decker Bus unit with a culminating project. Ask your first grader to tell you about it!

On Thursday we moved on to our Place Value unit. We were introduced to a few new games to support our understanding of place value. Here's an activity to try at home: 

1. Roll 2 dice.

2. Have your child make the largest number s/he can with the dice and write down that number.

3. Repeat

4. Now put a <, >, or = symbol between the numbers. 

On Friday we began our new science unit: Changes. We discussed solids, liquids and what the word "change" means. We then did an experiment where we observed a solid (effervescent tablet), a liquid (water), and then observed what happened 

when we put the tablet in the water. 

There were lots of oohs and aaahhh and... a camera in a pitcher of water. Drats.

 

We used all of our senses except for our sense of taste, of course! Ask your first grader to show you how we use our sense of smell in science. WAFT! WAFT! WAFT!

Also ask your first grader to tell you 

how the solid and liquid changed during our experiment. 

We began having volunteers join us for Writer's Workshop. 

Thank you to everyone who has signed up. We love having you here!

Conference slips were sent home Friday. Please send back your conference time preferences at your earliest convenience. Thank you!

Be sure to put next week's word wall words in www.spellingcity.com

They all lend themselves to word family work: 

back (track, stack, black, rack, Jack)

get (let, set, met, set)

did (hid, rid, bid, kid, slid)

day (play, stay, May, tray)

now (cow, plow, chow, bow)

Mark Your Calendars:

Wednesday, January 14 Early Release Day

MAP Testing: January 15th and 21st

NO SCHOOL/Staff Professional Development: Monday, January 19th

January 29th Bedtime Story Hour 6:30-7:30pm

Thanks for stopping by!

Michelle Mullen

December 15-19

Hello Families!

Our final week before the winter break found us continuing to explore nonfiction texts and deciding on a topic we were most interested in. We gathered our interesting facts, wrote them in our own words, then included pictures, diagrams and other text features to go with them. This nonfiction unit just got our feet wet with this genre. We'll explore nonfiction more in depth in the spring! Our photos show our fact-gathering first then our final projects! 

 


Our K4 book buddies joined us on Friday to make snowflakes. It was great to spend time with them!

 

 

Our Scholastic News issue for this last week was all about Holiday Economics. We learned about goods, services and having a budget. 

During Writer's Workshop this week, we continued to write about our realistic fiction characters. We discovered that we could focus on dialog by using our hands to mimic conversations our characters would have. 

This helped us to plan our stories with our partners. 

We also drew our characters and have them hung up with their names so that we can use each other's characters in our stories! Here are some of our characters:

Ask your first grader to tell you a little bit about his/her character. Some questions to ask: What kind of person is your character on the inside? What kind of trouble does your character experience? How does s/he solve the problems? Who are some other characters (secondary characters) in your stories?

Our focus in word work for the past two weeks has been on the 

short/long sounds and patterns for the vowel i. 

One of our activities was making words with long i and short i on the Smartboard.

In math, we continue our work with the Double Decker Bus! Our knowledge of ten partners and beyond grows every day! Here we are practicing with our partners: 

 

We enjoyed some painting on Friday - come on by to see our snow globes on our Happy New Year bulletin board just outside our classroom!

 

Our last day together in 2014 found us cleaning out our desks inside AND outside! There's nothing better to clean the outside with than SHAVING CREAM! 

Our Mitten Tree was a HUGE success this year! We collected 103 pairs of mittens and 21 hats! COA Youth and Family Centers received all this warmth on December 20th - just in time for the holidays and this polar vortex. Here is a link to their Facebook page where they posted about our Mitten Tree: https://www.facebook.com/COAYFC/posts/867854979932120

Thanks so much for your generous donations! 

When we return from winter break, we'll be reflecting on 2014 and setting goals for the new year ahead. I'm so looking forward to it!

Our new word wall words will be:

been

could

who

very

than

Please be sure to visit www.spellingcity.com to practice these tricky words!

Take care!

Mrs. Mullen 

Mark Your Calendars:

January 14: Early Release Day

January 19th: NO SCHOOL - Professional Development Day for Teachers

January 29th: First-Grade Bedtime Story Hour 6:30-7:30pm Please be sure to return a permission slip for this event for our first graders.

December 8-12

Hello First Grade Families!
We have been busy finding interesting nonfiction books, thinking about what we already know about the topic, thinking about what we wonder about the topic, and then recording our new learning after we've read the book.

After spending a couple days with our KWL chart, 

we then shared them with our

 reading partners.

We have so much to share with our reading partners, because we have been putting on the brakes while we've been reading! After getting our minds ready to read nonfiction, we put on the brakes when we say things like, "Wow!" and "That's amazing!"  and "Cool!" and "I never knew that!" These are great opportunities for us to "stop and jot" so that we can share our new learning with a friend.

We also talked about how we can put what we learned in our own words. It takes a lot of thinking to read a nonfiction book! Oftentimes one book covers a lot of information, so instead of telling our partner what the entire book was about, we got our feet wet sharing what each section was mostly about. In other words, "What was the author trying to teach me in this part?" We recorded our thinking for this as well and then shared with our partners. This can be a tricky skill that we will focus on 

again during our nonfiction unit in the spring. 

In Writer's Workshop we have been busy creating new adventures for our realistic fiction characters! My character Mrs. Readwell continued on her adventures as well: heading to the bookstore to buy a book for her sister Elizabeth and feeding her three cats - except that one was missing! Ask your first grader to tell you about these two adventures Mrs. Readwell had. What was the problem in each? What was the solution? We spent time discussing realistic problems for our characters and how to get them out of trouble. We also talked about how we can stretch the trouble down the page. James Howe does a great job of this in his Pinky and Rex series. For this lesson, we looked specifically at his book Pinky and Rex and the Bully. Ask your first grader to tell you about this book. Conversations with your young writer about story ideas for his/her realistic fiction character would be great as well! Brainstorm some story ideas that include a problem and solution. We were reminded again that writing comes easier to us when we connect to and use ideas from our own lives. We read Mr. Putter & Tabby Write the Book to remind us of this important lesson!

  

In math this week we reviewed for and took our Unit 3 assessment. Next, we began our Double Decker Bus unit, and the kiddos were introduced to the arithmetic rack. I hope you had a chance to read the letter that came home with them on Wednesday. It provides you a good understanding of the unit. We're quickly discovering how much easier it is to determine how many passengers are on the bus or on our arithmetic rack 

when we look for groups of 5 and ten!

We practiced this week's new word wall words in the computer lab this week! 

Next week's words: 

look

has 

two

no

big

Have a look at THIS! Ellie found this in her ditch on the way to school. Have you ever seen such an enormous maple leaf?! Thanks for sharing, Ellie!

On Friday we worked on a special winter project where we thought about what winter was like INSIDE. Here are some of our ideas:

Winter inside is...

when me and Tete sit by the fireplace and play Old Maid. 

when we say good bye to spring and summer and fall.

watching a movie with friends.

happiness coming around the house. 

a fuzzy brown blanket.

hot chocolate filling the air. 

spending time with my family.

snuggling and reading books.

watching Frosty the Snowman.

opening presents.

opening our final day.

That last one really stuck with me. Our friend who wrote this was referring to an Advent Calendar, but sentimental me thought of it in terms of any day - OPENING it. As if it were a GIFT. Every single one. What a good way to go about our days. 

So happy to be spending mine with your kiddos! 

Speaking of which, one of our kiddos will be heading off on a new journey this week. Ari is moving to Nebraska! He is so excited for his new home and new school. We're so happy for him but will miss his friendship, his laughter and all of his great ideas and input to our conversations. Ari, we think you're terrific! 

Happy trails to you until we meet again!

Mark your calendars: 

Tuesday, December 16 Ari's last day. Please join me in wishing Ari and his family all the best as they venture off to Nebraska!

December 17: Stormonth students reached our goal of earning 1,000 BUGS for Being Unusually Good! Way to go! This means we have earned 1,000 seconds of extra recess time! 

December 19: Our last day before our winter break.

January 5: Return from winter break. 

January 14: Early Release Day

January 19: NO SCHOOL/Professional Development day for staff

February 11, 12 & 16: Conferences

February 11: Early Release

February 16: NO SCHOOL/Conferences

February 25: Early Release

Beginning in January, I will be sending out a volunteer calendar for Writer's and Reader's Workshop times. I will do my best to accommodate your requests, however, know that I may not be able to accommodate them all. If there is an overabundance of volunteers who would like to sign up on a particular day, I'll select the first email I get. 

Thanks for your understanding!

Thanks for stopping by!

Michelle Mullen 

December 1-5

                                                                                    Hello First Grade Families!
What better way to end our week than with Pajama Day! We earned this special event by transitioning quickly and by working to support our peers and learners and ourselves - in other words, on task! Each time we were able to meet these expectations as an entire group, we received a letter in PAJAMA PARTY. We've been stopping to talk a bit here and there about the messages we are sending to others when we are not listening, talking when others are talking or speaking very loudly when others around are trying to concentrate. Looking at these lapses in the Stormonth Way in this way, how others are perceiving me or how others think I think about them, has been very powerful. Here we are celebrating PAJAMA DAY! Here we all are -  in our PJs and proud! 

Our vowel focus this week was short and long i. We looked at short i and long i words made with the silent -e pattern. One of the fun activities we did to support this learning was to first sort a list of words with short i/long i words, match up the short i/long i partners (i.e. cap/cape), then write all of short i words with Skittles for the dot on each i! This was a yummy and fun way to learn! 

In Reader's Workshop this week we began our nonfiction mini-unit. We began by doing a bit of exploring in our own classroom library and in bins of nonfiction books from our school library. We each looked for some topics that we were interested in learning more about then wrote them down. That way I now have an idea of what we need more of in our nonfiction collection and can hand-pick some just for them! 

Our science this week was about different types of clouds and how by observing them, we can anticipate the coming weather. We learned in Reader's Workshop about how readers put on the brakes before reading a nonfiction book. They stop to think about what they already know about the topic and what they would be interested to learn about the topic.  We then used this knowledge to create a KWL chart with The Cloud Book by Tomie DePaola.

  In Writer's Workshop we moved into our realistic fiction narrative writing unit. Each of the kiddos came up with a character and then thought about what that character was like on the outside and on the inside. We then began to imagine realistic adventures for our characters and discovered that the best source for those adventures is our own lives! We took our cue from author Cynthia Rylant whose stories come from events in her life.
We'll be using Lilian Hoban and James Howe (Pinky & Rex series) as
our mentor authors for this unit. 

 

We are nearing the end of our current math unit. This past week we spent a lot of time solving subtraction stories with various unknowns. We also spent some time discussing what the = symbol means. Ask your first grader to explain to you what it means. They should be able to tell you that it means that what is on one side of the symbol is the same amount as what is on the other.                       

We also looked at fact families and discovered that we could write four equations for our three math mountain numbers!

Friday brought our December poem and enjoying chicken soup with rice! I had to microwave our gluten-free option and keep it warm for a bit in our room, so I put the bowl carefully into a gallon ziplock bag. Well, learning is everywhere! Here is what happened inside that bag:

 Ask your first grader how this demonstrated the water cycle which we discussed in science last week!

Our countdown to winter break is on! We're counting down the last 12 days. Each day we draw a name out of our name bucket. Who ever is selected gets to take home that day's candy cane. YES, we do have school on Friday the 19th! Our last candy cane lets us know that there is ONE day left! 

This past week we began collecting mittens for our Mitten Tree service project for COA Youth and Family Centers. Thanks to everyone who has already made a donation!

Mark Your Calendars: 

Monday, December 8th: Progress Reports come home

Wednesday, December 10th: Early Release

Thursday, December 18th: Share Your Talent Day in Music Class

Saturday, December 20th: Winter Break Begins

Monday, January 5th: School Resumes

Wednesday, January 14th: Early Release

Monday, January 19th: NO SCHOOL/Professional Development Day for Staff

February 11, 12 & 16: Parent Teacher Conferences (NO SCHOOL on 2/16)

Thanks for stopping by!

Michelle