Today we had a blast learning about apples and their life cycles, using a pan balance to measure the weight of different apples, doing math facts with apple seeds, tasting and graphing our favorite kinds of apples (the courtland variety was our favorite!).... and making APPLESAUCE! What a fun Friday! Have a great weekend!
Our first graders have the opportunity to help create a Monarch habitat by planting butterfly-friendly wildflower seeds in a nearby nature park! So, on Monday (November 2nd), we will be walking to the nature park in the morning to observe how nature changes in the fall and plant seeds that can germinate over the winter. Please make sure your child wears tennis shoes and a coat/sweatshirt on Monday! Also, check out some photos below of our recent activities! This week will be another exciting week with plenty of new topics. In reading, we will be talking about connections (when our story reminds us of something). There are three main types of connections:
Text-to-Self: When the book reminds us of something in our lives Text-to-Text: When the book reminds us of another book, movie, or poem Text-to-World: When the book reminds us of something in the world around us. We will also start to learn about our next reading strategy: skippy frog. He teaches us that when we don't know a word, sometimes we can skip it and come back later. In math, we will be starting to work on pennies and nickels! On Friday, we will be having a fun fall/apple themed day. We will be reading stories about apples, tasting and graphing our favorite kinds of apples, doing apple seed math, and possibly making applesauce! *Phy Ed. will be having their annual "haunted-house" type activity on Thursday during our P.E. time, but because Halloween is on a Saturday, we will not be wearing costumes or celebrating Halloween here at school. I hope you have a safe and fun time with your families! First off, THANK YOU to all of the wonderful families for attending conferences! It was so great to see all of you and talk about goals for the year! As always, please don't hesitate to call, email, write a note, or stop in if you have any questions or concerns.
As we begin our full five-day week, I am excited to say that we will be tackling some new and tricky topics! In math this week, we will be starting to learn about analog clocks - how to identify the hour hand and minute hand, as well as reading time to the nearest hour (11:00, 3:00, 7:00, etc.). In reading, we will finish our review of the short vowels by creating word family flowers. Then, we will start focusing on blends that use the letter l (such as bl-, pl- and sl-). Our Junior Achievement volunteer will be joining us on Tuesday for our next lesson about the community, wants and needs, and jobs. On Thursday, our counselor will join us for our next SEL (social-emotional-learning) lesson. It's going to be a great week! Reminder: we have conferences this week after school on Monday and Tuesday, and during the day on Wednesday. This means we do NOT have school on Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday this week. If you forgot your conference time, please let me know! I look forward to meeting with all of you this week!
In our classroom this week, we will be finishing up our pollination unit by engineering and designing hand pollinators, talking more about nonfiction features (labels, diagrams, graphs, and captions), and talking about word families. We also have Jump Rope for Heart on Tuesday! It is so great to see all of these Power Reading charts coming back completed! Thanks for reading with your child at home! This is a very important piece in developing our reading skills.
As you read with your student, feel free to talk about the parts of a story. Use silly voices and just have fun! Reading is FUN! For fiction books: talk about the characters (who is in the story), the setting (where the story happens), and the plot (what happens in the story - we usually talk about the beginning, middle, and end). For nonfiction books: we have been learning about nonfiction features (labels, captions, graphs, diagrams, etc.). Try to point out these features and talk about why they are there. What can we learn from these features? Don't forget - I've posted a list of reading strategies that we use in school to solve unknown words. They're under "Reading Strategies" on this website. Above all, HAVE FUN! This week in room 1D, we will discuss online safety. We will also be talking about how our schema (the things we know about, like, and have experienced that make us who we are!) helps us understand our stories. We will also be learning about making connections to our stories, finding the character and setting, and using the pictures to help us solve new words (Eagle Eye reading strategy). For math, we will be exploring the numbers around us, the number grid, and addition facts that equal ten. We will keep working on adding 0 or 1, as well! In science, we will be starting our exciting unit about pollination - studying the parts of a plant, learning about pollination, and designing our own hand pollinators! Remember that picture day is Tuesday (October 6)! |
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December 2016
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