IMPORTANT DATES
• Wednesday, November 23rd: Early Dismissal, 12 noon. No lunch today. We will eat snack.
• Thursday and Friday, November 24th and 25th: No School. Thanksgiving break.
• Wednesday. November 30th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
• Thursday. December 8th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30,
Lunch is served.
• Wednesday. December 14th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
WEATHER
We will go outside for recess every day, unless it is raining. As the weather gets colder, please be sure to send appropriate outdoor clothing. This currently includes sweatshirts, jackets, and sometimes rain boots. In the winter, this will include heavy winter coats, hats, gloves, scarves, boots and snow pants.
These days, it can be chilly in the morning and warmer in the afternoon, so children often take jackets off at recess. Please label your child’s jacket/ sweatshirt. If your child is missing a jacket or sweatshirt, please check the school Lost and Found, across the hall from the Main office.
LITERACY
We practiced 2 new Literacy games this week: Building Words and What’s GNU? (a game by the makers of Zingo). Both games focus on making 3 letter words that can be sounded out. Students practice reading these words and recognizing word families. What’s GNU? also has an option to make the game more challenging by omitting more letters. We also continued the “What’s Happening Here?” center in which students write a descriptive narrative to go along with pictures taken during classroom activities. I am compiling these into a binder, so it will be another classroom book for children to read.
MATH
We are wrapping up chapter 3 of the Think Math curriculum. This chapter, we will focused on skip counting by 2’s and 5. We continued working with money, specifically counting nickels, then counting on the pennies. (ex. For 3 nickels and 2 pennies, we count, “5, 10, 15, 16, 17”)
WORD WALL WORDS: us, up, just, but, fun
This week, three of our Word Wall Words have a short u sound. We have continued to notice and practice word families.
SCIENCE
This week, we predicted what will happen when we pour all 3 liquids (cooking oil, maple syrup, and water) into a jar together. We observed these liquids in a jar so we could shake it. We made observations about the way the liquids moved, and the way they clung to the sides of the cups or jars, leading us to discuss the weights and density of these liquids.
WRITING
This week, we practiced using punctuation at the end of our sentences. We read a Gerald and Piggie book by Mo Williams to observe these marks in action. We discussed the uses of the period (.), exclamation mark (!) and question mark (?), and then we tried incorporating these marks into our own writing.
COMMUNITY
We successfully drew our designs for the Devotion Calendar project. The calendars will be pieced together and sent to print next week. When the calendar is complete, we will sell the calendars for $5 each and all profits will be donated to Heifer International. This week we focused on the designing aspect.
Next week, we will take a much closer look at the idea of needs vs. wants and how different communities in other parts of the world live. We will read Beatrice’s Goat, which illustrates how giving one goat to one family can impact a whole town! We will learn more about how Heifer International helps people all over the world. For more information on this organization, please check out their website: www.heifer.org
SNACK and SNUNCH
On Early Release (conference days that end at 12:30pm), we will eat lunch but will not have snack. Our lunch is scheduled for 10:30am on these days, followed by recess. This is a different schedule to get used to, and children might still be hungry after school. Your child might need to eat a bigger breakfast on these days, since our Snunch (Lunch at Snack time) is a little bit later then they are used to having snack. We have 3 more of these days in the fall and we will have four of these days in the spring.
ASK YOUR CHILD…
These questions can be conversation starters to discuss the week in school.
• What happened when we poured the syrup, oil, and water all into one jar?
• When would you use an exclamation mark (!) in your writing? Or where have you seen and exclamation mark (!) written?
• What did you draw for your calendar square? Which month did you make your square for?
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Sunday, November 13, 2011
1MC WEEKLY NEWS ~ November 10th, 2011
IMPORTANT DATES
Thursday. November 17th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
Wednesday, November 23rd: Early Dismissal, 12 noon. No lunch today.
Thursday and Friday, November 24th and 25th: No School. Thanksgiving break.
Wednesday. November 30th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
CONFERENCE SIGN-UP is posted outside the classroom. Please sign up for a time slot. This will be a half-hour meeting to receive and discuss the fall conference reports. If the times on the sign-up do not work for your family, please contact me and we can find a time to meet.
WEATHER
We will go outside for recess every day, unless it is raining. As the weather gets colder, please be sure to send appropriate outdoor clothing. This currently includes sweatshirts, jackets, and sometimes rain boots. In the winter, this will include heavy winter coats, hats, gloves, scarves, boots and snow pants.
These days, it can be chilly in the morning and warmer in the afternoon, so children often take jackets off at recess. Please label your child’s jacket/ sweatshirt. If your child is missing a jacket or sweatshirt, please check the school Lost and Found, across the hall from the Main office.
MATH
This week, we began chapter 3 of the Think Math curriculum. This chapter, we will focus on skip counting by 2’s and 5. We are beginning to study money, starting with pennies and nickels. We practiced making tallies, focusing on counting the bundles of fives then counting on the extras. In a similar way, we will practice counting nickels, then counting on the pennies.
LIBRARY
Since we had off school on Friday, we can keep our Library books for one more week. We will exchange our books this coming Friday, November 18th. In order to check out a new book on Fridays, students will need to bring their library books back to school on Fridays (or earlier). Please enjoy your child’s library book together at home, and help your child remember to bring the book back to school every Friday.
WORD WALL WORDS: on, stop, not, are, saw
This week, three of our Word Wall Words have a short o sound. We have continued to notice and practice word families.
SCIENCE
This week, we looked at 3 liquids: cooling oil, maple syrup, and water. We observed these liquids in a jar so we could shake it, and in cups so we could pour them. We made observations about the way the liquids moved, the rates they poured, and the way they clung to the sides of the cups or jars. Next week we will use these same 3 liquids, and see what happens when we put them all together in one jar, leading to discuss the weights and density of these liquids.
WRITING
This week, we practiced using sound words in our writing, inspired by the Robert Munsch books that we’ve read. We also focused on the idea that sentences start with a capital letter and end with a period (or other punctuation). As we move further into our Handwriting and Literacy curricula, we will encourage children to write using lower case letters and capital letters at appropriate times. We will talk more specifically about the types of words that begin with capital letters, so that children get more opportunities to practice this. It will take time; in kindergarten children learned and practiced mostly capital letters, so this is a big step for many children.
COMMUNITY
We will be taking a small break from our community unit to work on the Devotion Calendar project. We will work with another first grade class, one kindergarten class, on third grade class and one sixth grade class to create a calendar. Our class will be participating in the project by designing the borders for the months on the calendar. When the calendar is complete, we will sell the calendars for $5 each and all profits will be donated to Heifer International. This week we will focus on the designing aspect, and as we move into the holiday season we will take a much closer look at the idea of needs vs. wants and how different communities in other parts of the world live. Stay tuned for updates!
SNACK
Please pack a nutritious, filling, low-sugar snack for your child each day. We eat lunch at 12:40pm everyday, so our snack is very important to keep us energized during our long days.
*Please do not send Halloween candy as a snack. A small piece of candy may be sent with lunch, but we’d like to keep snack time for healthy, low-sugar snacks.
ASK YOUR CHILD…
These questions can be conversation starters to discuss the week in school.
• What did you notice when you poured the syrup, oil, and water?
• What are you working on in Art Class?
• What new math games did you learn this week?
• What did you notice about the penny that you observed?
Thursday. November 17th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
Wednesday, November 23rd: Early Dismissal, 12 noon. No lunch today.
Thursday and Friday, November 24th and 25th: No School. Thanksgiving break.
Wednesday. November 30th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
CONFERENCE SIGN-UP is posted outside the classroom. Please sign up for a time slot. This will be a half-hour meeting to receive and discuss the fall conference reports. If the times on the sign-up do not work for your family, please contact me and we can find a time to meet.
WEATHER
We will go outside for recess every day, unless it is raining. As the weather gets colder, please be sure to send appropriate outdoor clothing. This currently includes sweatshirts, jackets, and sometimes rain boots. In the winter, this will include heavy winter coats, hats, gloves, scarves, boots and snow pants.
These days, it can be chilly in the morning and warmer in the afternoon, so children often take jackets off at recess. Please label your child’s jacket/ sweatshirt. If your child is missing a jacket or sweatshirt, please check the school Lost and Found, across the hall from the Main office.
MATH
This week, we began chapter 3 of the Think Math curriculum. This chapter, we will focus on skip counting by 2’s and 5. We are beginning to study money, starting with pennies and nickels. We practiced making tallies, focusing on counting the bundles of fives then counting on the extras. In a similar way, we will practice counting nickels, then counting on the pennies.
LIBRARY
Since we had off school on Friday, we can keep our Library books for one more week. We will exchange our books this coming Friday, November 18th. In order to check out a new book on Fridays, students will need to bring their library books back to school on Fridays (or earlier). Please enjoy your child’s library book together at home, and help your child remember to bring the book back to school every Friday.
WORD WALL WORDS: on, stop, not, are, saw
This week, three of our Word Wall Words have a short o sound. We have continued to notice and practice word families.
SCIENCE
This week, we looked at 3 liquids: cooling oil, maple syrup, and water. We observed these liquids in a jar so we could shake it, and in cups so we could pour them. We made observations about the way the liquids moved, the rates they poured, and the way they clung to the sides of the cups or jars. Next week we will use these same 3 liquids, and see what happens when we put them all together in one jar, leading to discuss the weights and density of these liquids.
WRITING
This week, we practiced using sound words in our writing, inspired by the Robert Munsch books that we’ve read. We also focused on the idea that sentences start with a capital letter and end with a period (or other punctuation). As we move further into our Handwriting and Literacy curricula, we will encourage children to write using lower case letters and capital letters at appropriate times. We will talk more specifically about the types of words that begin with capital letters, so that children get more opportunities to practice this. It will take time; in kindergarten children learned and practiced mostly capital letters, so this is a big step for many children.
COMMUNITY
We will be taking a small break from our community unit to work on the Devotion Calendar project. We will work with another first grade class, one kindergarten class, on third grade class and one sixth grade class to create a calendar. Our class will be participating in the project by designing the borders for the months on the calendar. When the calendar is complete, we will sell the calendars for $5 each and all profits will be donated to Heifer International. This week we will focus on the designing aspect, and as we move into the holiday season we will take a much closer look at the idea of needs vs. wants and how different communities in other parts of the world live. Stay tuned for updates!
SNACK
Please pack a nutritious, filling, low-sugar snack for your child each day. We eat lunch at 12:40pm everyday, so our snack is very important to keep us energized during our long days.
*Please do not send Halloween candy as a snack. A small piece of candy may be sent with lunch, but we’d like to keep snack time for healthy, low-sugar snacks.
ASK YOUR CHILD…
These questions can be conversation starters to discuss the week in school.
• What did you notice when you poured the syrup, oil, and water?
• What are you working on in Art Class?
• What new math games did you learn this week?
• What did you notice about the penny that you observed?
Thursday, November 3, 2011
1MC WEEKLY NEWS ~ November 3rd, 2011
IMPORTANT DATES
Tuesday, November 8th: No School, Professional Day for teachers
Friday, November 11th: No School, Veteran’s Day
Thursday. November 17th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
Wednesday, November 23rd: Early Dismissal, 12 noon. No lunch today.
Thursday and Friday, November 24th and 25th: No School. Thanksgiving break.
CONFERENCE SIGN-UP is posted outside the classroom. Please sign up for a time slot. This will be a half-hour meeting to receive and discuss the fall conference reports. If the times on the sign-up do not work for your family, please contact me and we can find a time to meet.
WEATHER
We will go outside for recess every day, unless it is raining. As the weather gets colder, please be sure to send appropriate outdoor clothing. This currently includes sweatshirts, jackets, and sometimes rain boots. In the winter, this will include heavy winter coats, hats, gloves, scarves, boots and snow pants.
These days, it can be chilly in the morning and warmer in the afternoon, so children often take jackets off at recess. Please label your child’s jacket/ sweatshirt. If your child is missing a jacket or sweatshirt, please check the school Lost and Found, across the hall from the Main office.
MATH
We focused on telling time to the hour this week. Students can identify the long minute hand and the short hour hand. When the minute hand is pointing to the 12 and the hour hand to a number, the hour hand will dictate that it is ____ o’clock or ____:00. We practiced reading time on both digital and analog clocks, drawing the hands on a clock to show specific times, and moving the hands on a small, geared clock. Next week, we will focus on money (pennies and nickels) and skip counting bys 5’s (5, 10, 15, 20, etc.)
LIBRARY
In order to check out a new book on Fridays, students will need to bring their library books back to school on Fridays (or earlier). Please enjoy your child’s library book together at home, and help your child remember to bring the book back to school every Friday.
WORD WALL WORDS: it, if, did, big, said
This week, four of our Word Wall Words have a short i sound. We have continued to notice and practice word families.
FALL FESTIVAL
We celebrated Fall Festival on Monday with a number of Literacy and Math centers focusing on pumpkins, Halloween and Fall. As a class, we decided on a face to carve on our pumpkin. Students helped to scoop out the inside of the pumpkin and I carved the face. We came to a fair compromise about the shapes of the eyes when out vote ended in a tie. One of our projects this weeks was to count the seeds in the pumpkin. First we made guesses about how many pumpkin seeds there might be. Then we counted the seeds by putting 10 seeds in a cup. We made groups of 10 cups (100 seeds) and counted by tens and hundreds from there. We were surprised to find that our pumpkin had 419 seeds! We discussed reasons for guessing different numbers and strategies for counting such a large amount of items.
Thank you so much to Mika’s family for sharing delicious Halloween cookies with us. And Thank you to Ben K’s family for donating pumpkins and lollipops to our Fall Festivities. It was such a special day for the class and we are very grateful for your support.
SCIENCE
Next week, we will further explore the properties of liquids, specifically, the way that liquids “flow,” by pouring a number of liquids or tilting jars to watch liquids move. We will continue to use the term flow to describe the movement of liquids.
READING STRATEGIES
Strategies [for figuring out an unknown word while reading] that we will teach and practice in first grade include:
• Get your mouth ready to say the word.
• Skip the word.
• Chunk it~ look for parts of the word that you know.
• Read on.
• Look at the picture for clues.
• Look around the classroom for clues.
• Ask yourself:
• Does it look right?
• Does it sound right?
• Does it makes sense?
WRITING
We continued our writing curriculum. Each writing time, we will talk about specific writing skill and then practice in our writer’s notebook. Right now the writing skill we’re working on is focusing on a specific moment. Each time we write, we’ll spend 10-15 minutes of quiet writing time trying to write many details about a specific moment. I am not concerned about spelling or grammar at this time; it is mainly about children getting their ideas down on paper. Many students have been surprised by how many details they can write when they really put their mind to it!
SNACK
Please pack a nutritious, filling, low-sugar snack for your child each day. We eat lunch at 12:40pm everyday, so our snack is very important to keep us energized during our long days.
*Please do not send Halloween candy as a snack. A small piece of candy may be sent with lunch, but we’d like to keep snack time for healthy, low-sugar snacks.
ASK YOUR CHILD…
These questions can be conversation starters to discuss the week in school.
• How did your group count the pumpkin seeds? How many pumpkin seeds were in our class pumpkin?
• What new math games did you learn this week?
• Can you name some words in the “in” word family?
Tuesday, November 8th: No School, Professional Day for teachers
Friday, November 11th: No School, Veteran’s Day
Thursday. November 17th: Early Release Day, School ends at 12:30, Lunch is served.
Wednesday, November 23rd: Early Dismissal, 12 noon. No lunch today.
Thursday and Friday, November 24th and 25th: No School. Thanksgiving break.
CONFERENCE SIGN-UP is posted outside the classroom. Please sign up for a time slot. This will be a half-hour meeting to receive and discuss the fall conference reports. If the times on the sign-up do not work for your family, please contact me and we can find a time to meet.
WEATHER
We will go outside for recess every day, unless it is raining. As the weather gets colder, please be sure to send appropriate outdoor clothing. This currently includes sweatshirts, jackets, and sometimes rain boots. In the winter, this will include heavy winter coats, hats, gloves, scarves, boots and snow pants.
These days, it can be chilly in the morning and warmer in the afternoon, so children often take jackets off at recess. Please label your child’s jacket/ sweatshirt. If your child is missing a jacket or sweatshirt, please check the school Lost and Found, across the hall from the Main office.
MATH
We focused on telling time to the hour this week. Students can identify the long minute hand and the short hour hand. When the minute hand is pointing to the 12 and the hour hand to a number, the hour hand will dictate that it is ____ o’clock or ____:00. We practiced reading time on both digital and analog clocks, drawing the hands on a clock to show specific times, and moving the hands on a small, geared clock. Next week, we will focus on money (pennies and nickels) and skip counting bys 5’s (5, 10, 15, 20, etc.)
LIBRARY
In order to check out a new book on Fridays, students will need to bring their library books back to school on Fridays (or earlier). Please enjoy your child’s library book together at home, and help your child remember to bring the book back to school every Friday.
WORD WALL WORDS: it, if, did, big, said
This week, four of our Word Wall Words have a short i sound. We have continued to notice and practice word families.
FALL FESTIVAL
We celebrated Fall Festival on Monday with a number of Literacy and Math centers focusing on pumpkins, Halloween and Fall. As a class, we decided on a face to carve on our pumpkin. Students helped to scoop out the inside of the pumpkin and I carved the face. We came to a fair compromise about the shapes of the eyes when out vote ended in a tie. One of our projects this weeks was to count the seeds in the pumpkin. First we made guesses about how many pumpkin seeds there might be. Then we counted the seeds by putting 10 seeds in a cup. We made groups of 10 cups (100 seeds) and counted by tens and hundreds from there. We were surprised to find that our pumpkin had 419 seeds! We discussed reasons for guessing different numbers and strategies for counting such a large amount of items.
Thank you so much to Mika’s family for sharing delicious Halloween cookies with us. And Thank you to Ben K’s family for donating pumpkins and lollipops to our Fall Festivities. It was such a special day for the class and we are very grateful for your support.
SCIENCE
Next week, we will further explore the properties of liquids, specifically, the way that liquids “flow,” by pouring a number of liquids or tilting jars to watch liquids move. We will continue to use the term flow to describe the movement of liquids.
READING STRATEGIES
Strategies [for figuring out an unknown word while reading] that we will teach and practice in first grade include:
• Get your mouth ready to say the word.
• Skip the word.
• Chunk it~ look for parts of the word that you know.
• Read on.
• Look at the picture for clues.
• Look around the classroom for clues.
• Ask yourself:
• Does it look right?
• Does it sound right?
• Does it makes sense?
WRITING
We continued our writing curriculum. Each writing time, we will talk about specific writing skill and then practice in our writer’s notebook. Right now the writing skill we’re working on is focusing on a specific moment. Each time we write, we’ll spend 10-15 minutes of quiet writing time trying to write many details about a specific moment. I am not concerned about spelling or grammar at this time; it is mainly about children getting their ideas down on paper. Many students have been surprised by how many details they can write when they really put their mind to it!
SNACK
Please pack a nutritious, filling, low-sugar snack for your child each day. We eat lunch at 12:40pm everyday, so our snack is very important to keep us energized during our long days.
*Please do not send Halloween candy as a snack. A small piece of candy may be sent with lunch, but we’d like to keep snack time for healthy, low-sugar snacks.
ASK YOUR CHILD…
These questions can be conversation starters to discuss the week in school.
• How did your group count the pumpkin seeds? How many pumpkin seeds were in our class pumpkin?
• What new math games did you learn this week?
• Can you name some words in the “in” word family?
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