Weekly News!

This week has flown by! Even though we had a short week, we still accomplished a great deal in first grade! Here’s what we did:

Reading:
Our theme in Treasures this week was, “Growing Up”. Our reading strategies focus was on text structure and identifying sequence of events. The word pattern for our spelling words and making words lessons consisted of short /i/ words. During our making words lessons, the students use the tiles they have in their desks to copy the letters we use for each lesson. Then, they follow directions to manipulate the letters we have to make various words that follow our word pattern. Next, students come individually to the board to make the words on the Mimio screen. Then, once we have made all of the words, we use the Mimio to sort the words. So far, we have been sorting the words by their beginning letter, but these sorts will become more involved as the year goes on. We continued our Guided Reading groups, and the children are already starting to demonstrate the reading strategies we have worked on in their independent reading. We are working in all of our groups to read with fluency and expression. When we finish a story, we have been practicing retelling that story, naming the characters and setting, followed by what happened First, Next, Then, and Last. Next week, our Treasures theme will be “Pets”. We will focus on identifying characters and the setting in our selections. Our spelling pattern and making words lessons will be words that have /r/ blends. Speaking of spelling patterns and making words lessons, these word patterns are also found in our poem of the week. Don’t forget that each Friday, your child will be bringing home their green poetry folders. Their job is to re-read each of the poems in the folder, practicing their fluency and expression. They keep all of these poems in the folder, and bring their poetry folders with them to school on Monday. The following Friday, they will be sent home with another poem to add to their poetry practice routine!


Writing:
This week, our writing focus was on writing statements, and including capital letters and periods in these statements. I tell the students we also call these “telling sentences”, so you may hear them refer to statements as telling sentences as well. Next week, we will focus on writing questions (“asking sentences”) and exclamations correctly. We have finished our handwriting instruction (hooray!) and will continue to practice the correct formation of letters as we begin our October handwriting book next week. During Writing Workshop, we will begin our “Small Moments” writing. This will focus on writing a personal narrative, and writing about an event in the correct sequence. We will also work on developing our sentences to add more details and descriptive (or “juicy”) words.

Math:
This week, we had a day of Explorations, followed by pennies, nickels, and a time review. Next week, we will count pennies and nickels in combination, number models, and subtraction models.

Social Studies/Science:

This week we concluded our Map Skills unit with the flip book we made, illustrating our Continent, Country, State, and City. These are helpful to keep at home as a reference for students to keep reviewing this tricky concept! We also used our Mimio Vote system to review the concepts we covered in our Map Skills unit! The students loved this game show-type review, and were eager to see how well the class did after each question! The system takes all of the anonymous answers and creates a pie chart to show how many students chose each of the three answers. They were very proud of how well they did answering those questions! We also spent some time discussing Christopher Columbus in preparation for our holiday on Monday. Next week, we will switch gears, moving from Social Studies to Science. We will begin our States of Matter unit with an introductory activity, learning the beginning of our Matter Chant, and a lesson exploring and identifying solids.

Have a nice, unseasonably warm, long weekend!

☺ Mrs. Glaser

¬Upcoming Events:
Monday, 10/10: Columbus Day- No School
Tuesday, 10/11: Monday Schedule **BRING LIBRARY BOOKS!**
Friday, 10/14: Spirit Day
Sunday, 10/16: LUCA’S BIRTHDAY!