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?