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 17-20, 2017

Specials

Monday - NO SCHOOL!

Tuesday - 6

Wednesday -1

Thursday - 2

Friday - 3

Save this image for a quick reference guide! (I promise it is easier to read once you've saved it!)

Upcoming Events & Reminders
January 16 - MLK Day. No school
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

Beginning in January, we will be increasing the number of words on each list and asking students to write a dictated sentence. This means that we will choose one of the spelling words and ask students to use it in a sentence that we dictate. I will not be assessing the spelling of all of the words in the sentence but will assess the sentenced based on Capitalization, Finger Spaces, punctuation, and spelling the word correctly. 

LIST A

ride

vine

kite

time

like

fire

smile

slide

LIST B

slide

bride

smile

wipe

chime

prize

white

thrive

Kid-Friendly Objectives
I can read, write, and identify words with the i_e spelling pattern.
I can write to tell my opinion and support it with at least 2 reasons.
I can read data from a graph.
I can identify and use text features in a nonfiction text.
I can use shades of meaning to understand verbs.

Week in Review
Our first full week back from winter break...did you survive? I barely did! Your first graders, of course, did wonderfully. Here's a fun look back at their hard work!

I love watching their growth in writing. There is something magical about the month of January when things just seem to click with our kids. It's as if they leave in December as first graders and come back in January as "soon-to-be-second-graders." Our writing unit is circling back around to opinion pieces. To change it up a bit to handle my practically second graders, we are focusing on the art of persuasion. 

To begin, we revisited our dear old friend Pigeon with the book:

The kids came up with reasons why they believed the pigeon SHOULD or SHOULD NOT be able to stay up late.

The next day, we read a book titled "Cold Weather" and decided to try to persuade others of our opinion about Winter. 

Our class was, collectively, in love with Winter!

That was too easy of a topic. Next, we read:

and created a list of our dream vacation spots. Some of the kids were so inspired by this writing prompt that they chose to spend their Work on Writing time during Daily 5 to persuade Mrs. Strange to let us go on dream field trips. We are still waiting to hear back from her about Myrtle Beach ;-).

Reading this week was all about Text Features and PENGUINS!
Here are some of the text features we've discussed:

We have enjoyed using our Penguin Text Feature booklets to do some research about penguins, too!
So far, we have learned about the HUGE emperor penguin and the 2nd largest, King Penguin.

In math, we used our pigeon friend to help us continue practicing measurement. We used another directed drawing (In case you haven't noticed, I'm a little addicted...). Each kiddo had the choice of measuring their pigeon with an eraser, cubes, or paperclips. We discussed the importance of estimating a length and NAMING the unit we choose to measure with. We even took a real deal (assessment) on Friday for measurement and CRUSHED IT. We are so ready to tackle data and graphing next week!

Last, but ABSOLUTELY not least, we discussed Martin Luther King Jr. on Friday with this AMAZING Reading Rainbow episode:

The kids really got it...especially when they looked around the room and noticed how diverse our classroom is. They were devastated to realize that MLK lived in a time that our classroom would have been deemed illegal. To send the message home, we did the egg experiment.

We discussed what was similar about these two eggs and what was different. We agreed that while they looked different, they were both obviously eggs. I cracked open the white egg and revealed the expected yellow yolk. The kids then made predictions about what they would find on the inside of the brown egg. Many predicted it would be a brown yolk because the egg was different than one they'd seen before! I cracked open the egg, spun the plate around, and asked, "Can you tell me which one is the brown egg now?" They were stumped. When asked what they can learn from these eggs, one of your wonderful first graders came to the front of the classroom and loudly proclaimed,

"You can't judge a kid by how they look on the outside. You have to look at their heart and their mind."

I hope you have a restful day off for MLK Day and take a moment to be thankful that your first grader gets to spend his/her days with such a beautiful, kind, and diverse group of students every day. Have a wonderful week!