Hello First Grade Families!
We have come down with an exciting case of "green thumbs" here in Team 210! From creating components of our class "vowel-team garden" our on our bulletin board to tending our Chia Pets and designing "dream gardens" with Mrs. Kurtz, we are enjoying celebrating the spring. Ask Me About.... Literacy...This week we began circling back around to nonfiction texts. In preparation for researching a NH animal, Mrs. Brewster has begun teaching us how to take important information from a nonfiction text and put it into a graphic organizer. Word Study...This week, we learned two new vowel teams -oe and -ou. Both teams create the /oo/ sound. We also learned though, that just like -ow can have two sounds, -ou has two sounds as well. It can be used in both soup and trout. Math...This week we continued adding with place value and comparing numbers. However, into the mix we added the concept of a function machine. A function machine serves the purpose of allowing us to focus on how a number changes. A function machine needs to have a rule such as, "add 10" or "subtract 5." Every number that goes into the machine needs to be changed by the rule before it comes out. If 10 goes into the function machine and the rule is "add 10" we need to add 10+10 in order for 20 to come out! Writing...We have officially finished our fiction stories and will begin illustrating our published books on Monday in preparation for our writing celebration Friday afternoon! We completed our first Chia Pet observation and are thrilled with their growth! We are also looking forward to celebrating Poem in Your Pocket Week next week! We will write poetry about what our 5 senses experience in spring! Upcoming Events!
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Hello First Grade Families!
Hopefully there is no snow to darken our skies this week! We are optimistic in room 210! Last week, we celebrated the beginning of spring by taking the opportunity to discuss the living things around us. Though we automatically think of people and animals, the living things around us include the plant life that is beginning to bloom all around us! We are discussing the attributes of living and nonliving things in order to prepare us for a upcoming unit on New Hampshire wildlife. What better way to learn about what things need to stay alive than to discover it ourselves? Each of us is keeping a "Chia Pet" (of our own making) in the classroom! We will water our plants, make sure they have plenty of sunlight, and observe how they grow over the coming weeks! Stay tuned to watch their progress! Ask Me About.... Literacy...This week we finished our current reading group books and continued to divide our time between reading and practicing our word study principles. Some literacy activities that have been consistently included in our routine are rearranging jumbled words to make a sentence, practicing our new vowel teams by spelling with magnetic letter tiles, and dictating vowel team words to reinforce those long vowel sounds. We just took our Unit 9 Fundations assessment which will be coming home shortly. Word Study...This week, while reviewing closed syllables and our long a and long e vowel teams, we were also introduced to two new vowel teams that produce a sound similar to long o. These are -oi and -oy. Math...As we continue to grow in our confidence with place value, we are able to take on so many new tasks! We have applied place value to two-digit addition, and this week, began comparing the values of numbers based on their place value. One meaningful activity was realizing that digits do not have a value unless they are in a place value. For example, we practiced taking two digits such as 2 and 7 and arranging them to make the lowest and highest numbers we could. The 2 had the value of 20 when it was in the tens place and the 7 had a value of 7 when it was in the ones place to make 27. But if the digits were reversed, the 7 would have a value of 70 in the tens place and 2 would have the value of 2 in the ones place to make 72. We will continue discussing the importance of differentiating the digit vs. the value. Writing...We used our writing time this week to brainstorm what it means for something to be living or nonliving. We decided, as a class, that things that are living need: food, water, sunlight, sleep, shelter, safety, and an appropriate habitat Upcoming Events!
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Hello First Grade Families!
I can't say I'm terribly surprised that we kicked off our Monday, the second day of April, with a snow squall! You should have heard the groans when we looked out the window! We are coming into our "home stretch" of the school year, with April break being one of our final benchmarks. We will begin many projects now that will culminate in larger learning experiences by the end of the year! It will be exciting to get these started now and share them with you in the months to come! Ask Me About.... Literacy...This week we got out of our reading group books and spent a good deal of our time reviewing word study principles and applying them in our reading. One of our jobs this week was to keep a running list of all of the glued sounds that we found in our texts. Examples of these glued sounds are all, am, an, ing, ang, ong, ung, ink, ank, onk, and unk! Word Study...This week, while reviewing closed syllables, we also were introduced to some vowel teams that produce long vowel sounds. For example, we know that ai and ay stand together to make the long a vowel sound, and that ee, ea, and ey stand together to make the long e vowel sound. Math...Last week, we took our study of place value to the next level by using it to help us add two-digit numbers together! We practiced identifying our two-digit numbers by representing them with base-ten blocks in order to show the value of each digit in the number. Then, to add our two numbers together, we combined our pictures together and counted the base-ten blocks we had drawn to reach the sum. This gives us great practice skip counting! We also added the term, flat, into our repertoire. A flat signifies 10 longs with the value of 100. Writing...We continued our story on chart paper and have one more chapter left to write! We will be working on revising our work this week as we prepare to have our final version of our stories ready to be published before April Vacation! Upcoming Events!
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AuthorMusings of a Grade 1 teacher. Outlet for exciting "goings-on" in the classroom. Archives
May 2018
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