January 30 - February 3, 2017

Specials

Monday - 2

Tuesday - 3

Wednesday -4

Thursday - 5

Friday -6

Upcoming Events & Reminders
February 3 - 2nd grading period awards. 10AM. I have e-mailed you if your child will be receiving an award for the past 9 weeks!
We will also be watching Happy Feet on this day. Please return your permission slip by Friday OR complete it online at this link: Happy Feet Online Permission Slip
February 14 - Valentine's Day Celebration! More details coming this week - we will be in need of supplies and volunteers!
February 20 - President's Day. No School
February 21-March 10 - Jump Rope for Heart
March 7 - Family Fun Night at City BBQ

Spelling List

LIST A

pie
tie
lie
died
tied
pies
lies

LIST B

same as List A

Kid-Friendly Objectives
I can read, write, and identify words with the -ie spelling pattern. (Long I)
I can write to tell my opinion and support it with at least 2 reasons.
I can correctly tell time to the hour and half hour.
I can identify an author's point and the reasons he/she gives to support it.
I can correctly match a verb to its singular or plural noun.

Week in Review
We started this week off with the 99th day of school! Evil Dr. Double Digit came to school and tried to keep us from making it to the 100th day. Thankfully, Zero the Hero let all of the other first grade classes know there were challenges we could complete that would help us defeat Evil Dr. Double Digit.

We came to school ready to defeat him!

We made our capes full of one hundred things (we had to prove we were smart enough to make it to triple digits). 

We also did 100 exercises. Talk about team work and encouragement...the kids were encouraging each other to keep going in order to get them all finished! 

After completing all of the challenges, we finally made it to the 100th day. We had so much fun pretending to be from the future...even the teachers joined in on the fun!

For reading this week, we focused on the power author's use to include information in pictures AND words in nonfiction texts.

We used this newfound skill to help us learn about these penguins:
South African Penguins

South American Penguins

Rockhopper penguins

and Macaroni Penguins!

This was our last week of practicing opinion writing before we used our honed skills to write a published piece about penguins. 
We had fun with this book: 

We wrote our opinion of what we would want it to rain!

We also wrote our opinion of why a particular family member is great!

(We deliberately did not choose the BEST family member because we know everyone in our family is wonderful :) )

We also learned that some people can even get paid to write their opinions! Cue the MOVIE REVIEW! Some of our kids even made a connection to seeing app reviews in the app store...I think I hear a future Work on Writing prompt in the works...

On Monday, we finished up our data unit in Math with SKITTLES!

Then we moved into telling TIME!!! This is a monster of a unit so this past week was only about telling time to the hour.

This song helped us incorporate our Kinesthetic and Auditory learners by moving and singing to teach us how to read a clock!

We started out by doing some investigating to determine how long one second, one minute, and one hour really are.

We closed our eyes and raised our hand when we thought 1 minute had passed and BOY did we have a lot of misconceptions! :-) 

Afterwards, we brainstormed a list of things we can do in one SECOND and a list of things we can do in one MINUTE. Finally, we sorted activities by each increment of time.

The next day, we built a clock to see how many minutes were in an hour.

 Then we took turns moving the hour hand (green for start here) and leaving the minute hand (red for stop) to read different times on the clock.

 They were only a LITTLE proud for venturing into the half hour.

Finally...it was time for PLAYDOH!
We practiced rolling the time and building it on our own clock mats.

We ended the week with a nice, relaxing read with our 4th grade buddies (and some minor talk about the impending snow!) 

Hope you have a fabulous week ahead!

January 23-27, 2017

Specials

Monday - 4

Tuesday - 5

Wednesday -6

Thursday - 1

Friday - Non-Rotation Day

Upcoming Events & Reminders
January 23 - 99th Day. Dress in all black!
January 24 - 100th Day. Dress like you live 100 years into the future
January 27 - Non-rotation day. STEM Day
February 3 - Tentative date for 2nd grading period awards
February 20 - President's Day. No School

Spelling List

LIST A

high

night

sigh

light

fight

tight

bright

slight

 

LIST B

bright

slight

fright

light

might

delight

tonight

knight

Kid-Friendly Objectives
I can read, write, and identify words with the -igh spelling pattern.
I can write to tell my opinion and support it with at least 2 reasons.
I can correctly tell time to the hour.
I can determine whether information in a text came from the pictures or the words.
I can correctly match a verb to its singular or plural noun.

Week in Review
Hi everyone! :) 
We started our 4-day week with a refresher on why we did not have school on Monday. I don't know if you are familiar with Kid President but he often has very powerful videos that are presented in a kid-friendly way. Here is his video on MLK Jr. that we watched Tuesday morning.

We used his video as a quick refresher that helped lead us into our writing prompt for the day. The kids LOVE to tell their opinions in writing - and they sure do have a lot of opinions. :-P

The exciting piece for the week was our Cutest Pet Contest. The kids either brought in a photograph or illustrated one. I insisted that Max was the cutest pet of all and several of the kids were ready to argue their pets for the win! We talked about how sometimes you need to persuade someone to believe your opinion. Here are some of our persuasive pieces.

As we complete our Penguin Unit, we will be choosing the most interesting penguin and explaining why we think they are so interesting. 

We kept up our penguin research by studying the Gentoo and Chinstrap Penguins this week!

The kids have been working on completing research independently.

We also had some fun with Shades of Meaning this week! Shades of Meaning help set the groundwork for synonyms. We learned that shades of meaning help authors turn their stories into more exciting stories by using verbs that are very similar but are a SHADE different. At the end of the week, we made some Shades of Meaning Super Heroes.

In Math, we continued our Measurement and Data unit by creating and interpreting graphs! We have discussed the importance of how graphs can help us and how we can analyze the data they show.

These kiddos are showing off how they analyzed their snowman data!

We have one more day of data tomorrow before we assess in the afternoon. Next up: TELLING TIME!!!

TurtleDiary has a fun, simple game to practice turning an analog clock into a digital clock. Your first grader can use this to practice time telling at home (of course, you can practice in many other ways, too!)