February 6-10, 2017

Specials

Monday - 1

Tuesday - 2

Wednesday -3

Thursday - 4

Friday -5

Upcoming Events & Reminders

February 14 - Valentine's Day Celebration! Click here to volunteer or donate to our event!
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

read

heat

meal

bee

tree

need

sheep

clean

LIST B

clean

plead

dream

sheep

cheese

coffee

screen

least

Kid-Friendly Objectives
I can read, write, and identify words with the ea or ee spelling patterns. (Long E)
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 use prefixes to change the meaning of a word.

Week in Review
Your first grader has been working hard on the skill of reading nonfiction texts. As we wrapped up our unit on penguins this week, we focused on the ability to identify an author's main point and the reasons they give to support it. As I began to prepare for this week and to think about how I would present it to first graders, I thought of a cow.

We used this visual to help us break apart an author's writing using a nonfiction book from Raz-Kids. (Don't forget, you can access leveled texts for your kid at home by visiting www.kidsa-z.com and using my username: acarney8) :) 

(yes, this cow only has 3 legs because the author only gave us 3 reasons to support his point!)

Each time we analyzed the author's writing, we had a good laugh about what would happen to the cow if the author did not give it ANY legs to stand on! 

Eventually, the kids began to make the connection that this cow is EXACTLY like our opinion writing - we tell the BIG point and then prove it to our audience. 

We continued to practice this skill using Scholastic News.

 We started to notice a pattern that the author's big point was typically the heading or the topic sentence of each section.

But we kept drawing cows just to make sure we REALLY got it.

Some of us even chose to use this new way of organizing information as a method for organizing facts for our PENGUIN WRITING! We chose the most interesting penguin and researched it to prove why it is so interesting.

Here are our final pieces: 

 (Madison - your face is cracking me up!!!)

We're all so proud of our hard work!

We completed our writing pieces Friday morning and went STRAIGHT INTO PAINTING!!

I wish I had a chance to take more pictures of this in action but alas...one Mrs. Carney trying to pass paint out to 26 students was as crazy as the picture you've made up in your head. So here are their final products, instead:

These girls worked hard on making a life size King Penguin. Can you believe they're that big compared to a first grader?!

Chinstrap Penguin:

 South African Penguin:

 The always cool Macaroni Penguin:

 Nate was part of the South African Penguin group, too!

 The South American Penguin:

 The cute, cute, cute Adelie Penguin!

We spent the rest of our Friday going to the awards ceremony and watching Happy Feet. Oh, did I forget to mention the MASSIVE Book Box we received?!

Thanks to all of you who order each month and earn points for our students, we received SO many great things for our room. More than half of this table got to stay in the room with us! We used our points to get new chapter books, new phonics box sets, picture books, a clock with movable gears, and we earned 10 FREE books! 

Because of you, we also have coupons that I get to send home with our next book order to reduce your costs. :) We've also been bumped into "Green Apple Teacher" status which means our class gets more goodies periodically from Scholastic. 

 From the bottom of our hearts...

THANK YOU!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 We LOVED going through our new goodies. :)

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!