Weekly Updates 14-18

Hello,

This is our last full week of December before Winter Break. It's hard to believe how quickly time is flying. We will be having yoga again this week Friday (thank you Mrs. McEneany), so remember to have your child wear comfy clothing.

Upcoming Events:

Tuesday, December 15th-11:30 Dismissal

Thursday, December 24-Sunday January 3rd-Winter Break

  

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: We've started to read about topics we are interested in. After spending some time reading about our topic, we meet with our clubmates to discuss and grow our ideas. This week we will be learning how we can use our hands and fingers to stay organized when telling the main idea and details of our book, comparing books about our topic to grow ideas and make our learning more interesting, coming up with our own ideas about what we are learning, and thinking about why what we are learning is so important.

Writers' Workshop: We will be finishing up our Informational Writing Unit before break. We all received lots of positive comments from our readers who came to Family Night. We taught our readers lots of new things!
This week we will be learning how we can teach readers what new words mean with words and pictures, how to edit step by step, and then fancy our books up for our celebration. 

Math Workshop: This week we are working seeing 10s and extra ones. We solved some story problems using this concept today. This was a little tricky at first!

For example: Sam had 16 pencils. A pencil box holds 10. How many boxes can he fill? How many pencils will be left over? 

We will also be using the Make a Ten strategy to solve story problems. Example: 7 tigers play games. Then 5 more tigers join them. How many tigers are playing games now? Here's one way to solve this using Make a Ten strategy:

We will also spend some time practicing doubles of numbers 1-10 (eg. 1+1=2, 2+2=4, 4+4=8).

Science/Social Studies:  We shared our weather research with the class on Friday. We learned so many new things! This week we will learn how umbrellas were invented, create our own umbrella, and complete a quick assessment to show everything we've learned about weather. 

  

Word Study: We introduced 5 new word wall words today. The words are: did, was, tell, said, ride. We will be assessing these words on Friday. These are words we want students to be able to read and write automatically without having to think to sound them out. Students also continue to work on phonics skills and word sorts at their developmental level.

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

Kathy Zobel

First Grade

New Directions Learning Community