Weekly Updates March 29-April 1

Hello,

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a relaxing and enjoyable break! We ended last week with another successful egg crack off. This is such an exciting event for students. See below for photos. This year our very own Brennan was the school champion! Way to go Brennan. We'll have to get egg boiling tips from the Novys for next year's crack off.

Upcoming Events:

Friday, April 8th: Knowledge-A-Thon

Tuesday, April 12th: Family Night-Science, Social Studies and Subs  5:30-7:00. A note is coming home today.

Monday, April 18th-No School-Inservice for teachers

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: This week first graders are really digging deep into their roles as directors and actors. Readers are getting ready for partnerships by marking up the most important parts of their books and noting how the characters are feeling and what they are thinking. We will also be trying out scenes in several different ways to see which one best gets at the character's real feelings. Readers will spend some time remembering what it means to be a successful reading club member by thinking about how o be a good listener, how to take turns speaking, giving one another proms and how to talk off of each other's ideas. 

Writers' Workshop: We are finishing up our "Writing Like Scientists" unit. Writers will work on planning and conducting one last experiment with their partners. We will also be conducting one more experiment as a class. We will be ending our unit on Friday and next week will be starting our next unit, From Scenes to Series:Writing Fiction. 

Math Workshop:. This week we will continue working on solving comparison problems. We are using comparison bars to help us solve these problems and discussing comparison language such as more and fewer. We also continue to work on our fact fluency-solving addition and subtraction equations within 10. We will be completing our end of the unit assessment on Friday.

Science/Social Studies: We'll be learning more about US symbols this week. We'll spend some time reading about symbols and taking notes on our learning. Then, students will have the chance to learn even more about a symbol of their choice. Some of the symbols we will study are: Bald Eagle, Liberty Bell, Statue of Liberty, The Flag, as well as other symbols students want to learn more about.

We also start Junior Achievement this week.  A volunteer from a local business comes into our classroom once a week for 5 weeks and conducts a lesson that lasts about 30 minutes. JA programs focus on the skills necessary for students to develop work readiness, financial literacy and entreprenuerism all at the first grade level. The program is designed to be interactive using practical hands on activities that reinforce key concepts to prepare and inspire students to succeed in a global economy. The title of the first grade program is: Our Families. 

Our Families® emphasizes the roles people play in the local economy and engages students with activities about needs, wants, jobs, tools and skills, and interdependence.

· Concepts–Business, Choices, Consumers, Economic institutions, Employment, Family, Incentives, Income, Interdependence, Jobs, Needs, Resources, Scarcity, Skills, Tools, Voluntary exchange, Wants, Work

· Skills–Analyzing information, Decision-making, Differentiating, Drawing, Following directions, Interpreting symbols, Listening responsively, Making observations, Map reading, Matching, Teamwork

Word Study: New words this week are: animal, can't, wont. Words will be assessed this Friday, April 1, 2016

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

Kathy Zobel

Weekly Updates March 14-18 and March 21-22

Hello,

We had a successful Authors' Breakfast last week. Students appreciated the compliments about their writing. They are even more motivated to write their lab reports! 

Upcoming Events:

Thursday, March 17th-Field Trip to the PAC to see The BFG. Feel free to dress nicely for this event!

Monday, March 21st and Tuesday, March 22nd-Portfolio Conferences.

Wednesday, March 23rd-End of Third Quarter

Wednesday March 23rd-Monday March 28th-Spring Break

Friday, April 8th: Knowledge-A-Thon

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: We finished up the last part of our unit by teaching kindergarten friends about the books we've been reading. We prepared paper "fortunes" for our friends with the life lesson from our book and gave it to them during our celebration. We started out by introducing our book, telling about the characters and the big events, passed along the lesson and read a bit of our book. See below for photos of us sharing our learning with the kindergartners! This week and next week we will be digging deeper into our character work. We're going to spend some days reading our books as if we were characters and learning the job of a narrator. At the end of the week we will be joining character clubs in which partners will read several books with the same character to really get to know the characters well. We'll even be spending some time acting our books out! Ask your child what character he or she is planning on getting to know even better!

Writers' Workshop: We are continuing our "Writing Like Scientists" unit. Last week first graders had an opportunity to plan, conduct and write about their own experiments! What a huge success. We are working on recording our results by writing "I notice..." and "I see.." to say even more. We're also trying to be accurate on recording the steps we took for our experiments so other people could try them and see what results they give. We've been trying to rehearse and practice each step adding as much detail as we can. This week we will plan out another experiment using what we've learned from our first experiments, as well as what we noticed other scientists using. It appears that mixing some liquids can cause some over flowing! I'm excited to see the new combinations this week.

Math Workshop: We're continuing our Comparisons in Data unit this week. Students conducted and and represented data with their own surveys last week. This week we will continue working on solving comparison problems. We are using comparison bars to help us solve these problems and discussing comparison language such as more and fewer. We also continue to work on our fact fluency-solving addition and subtraction equations within 10.

Next week we will be completing the assessment for this unit.

Science/Social Studies: We'll be finishing up our solids and liquids unit this week. We'll be using everything we learned about the properties of solids and liquids to help us compare the two. We'll also complete a short assessment to show what we have learned!

Word Study: New words this week are: first, next, again. Words will be assessed this Friday, March 18. 

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

Kathy Zobel

Investigating Liquids During Science

Weekly Updates March 7-11

Hello,

It looks like this week will be bringing some warmer weather. Yippee! Students are still encouraged to wear their boots outside to keep their feet dry and try to keep the mud out of our classroom. Try to spend sometime outside this week.If that means a little less math or reading at home, we understand!

Upcoming Events:

Friday, March 11th-Author Breakfast-Join us anytime between 7:15-7:45 AM to read published work of New Directions' students.

Thursday, March 17th-Field Trip to the PAC to see The BFG. Please return permission slip and money if you haven't already.

Monday, March 21st and Tuesday, March 22nd-Portfolio Conferences. Confirmation forms with scheduled times will come home Friday, March 4th.

Wednesday March 23th-Monday March 28th-Spring Break

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: As we continue our character unit, we move into the next part of our unit, "Learning Important Lessons." We will be discovering the lessons our stories teach by re rereading the end and thinking, "How did the trouble get fixed?" and think, "What did the character realize or learn?" As we read, we always keep the life lessons in mind and try to predict the life lesson from the beginning.  We will also be comparing the books we read looking for similarities and differences in the characters and life lessons. As we learn more about the lessons in our books, we'll start to group our books together by the lessons the teach. 

Writers' Workshop: We are continuing our "Writing Like Scientists" unit. Last week we conducted two different experiments: liquids in a bottle (dish soap, oil and rubbing alcohol) and mixing half and half, sugar and vanilla in a baggie and adding it to another baggie with ice and it turned into ice cream. Directions for the ice cream came home on Friday if you wanted to try this out at your house. It was a big hit, and the first grade scientists were already coming up with ideas on ways they change the experiment by adding in different flavors. As we conducted our experiments we wrote up lab reports which included questions, hypotheses, procedures, results and conclusions. This week first graders will be conducting their own solids and liquids experiments and recording them in lab reports. 

Math Workshop: We're continuing our Comparisons in Data unit this week. In the beginning of the week first graders will be conducting their own survey with a partner, surveying our class and representing the data. Some examples of questions students may ask are: Which do you like better: summer or winter? Or, which would you rather eat: grapes or apples? I can't wait to hear all the questions first graders are wondering! We'll end our week by using comparison bars to help us solve compare story problems. For example, Kim has 10 crayons. Sam has 3. How many more crayons does Kim have than Sam?

Science/Social Studies: This week we'll be investigating liquids in centers to learn even more about their properties.  Our centers will include: drop races, mixing liquids, flowing liquids and using pebblego to learn more about matter.

Word Study: New words this week are: how, your, people, friend. Words will be assessed this Friday, March 14. 

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

Kathy Zobel

Weekly Updates February 29-March 4

Hello,

Today we welcome in March. Hopefully the weather isn't an indication of what the rest of the month will bring! See below for what's happening in First Grade this week.

Upcoming Events:

Friday, March 11th-Author Breakfast-Join us anytime between 7:15-7:45 AM to read published work of New Directions students.

Thursday, March 17th-Field Trip to the PAC to see The BFG. Please return permission slip and money if you haven't already.

Monday, March 21st and Tuesday, March 22nd-Portfolio Conferences. Confirmation forms with scheduled times will come home Friday, March 4th.

Wednesday March 23th-Monday March 28th-Spring Break

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: This week we are continuing to study the characters in our books. We will learn that characters' feelings change and we can change our voices to match our characters' feelings and readers can retell how the character's feelings change. We can mark these parts with postits to help us remember the important part and then readers can talk more about these parts by saying things such as, "This is important because...This got me thinking...One thing I notice..." We will also be looking for clues that help us know how to bring the characters to life such as: punctuation at the end, punctuation in the middle, special print (bold, italic, capital), dialogue and dialogue tags (whispered, shouted) and pictures.

Writers' Workshop: This week we are starting our "Writing Like Scientists" unit. Students will use what they know about writing informational writing to write about science concepts. During this unit we will use writing to explore the properties of matter: solids, liquids and gases. This fits nicely with our Solids and Liquids unit in science. Students will be engaging in the work that scientists do-developing and testing hypotheses, gathering data, and studying information for patterns-all at a first grade level! We will be conducting and writing about experiments as a class, and students will also have the opportunity to conduct their own experiments and write about them. Don't be surprised if this carries over to home and students want to conduct their own liquid experiments at home!

Math Workshop: We're starting a new unit in math this week, Comparisons in Data. In this unit students will be representing and comparing data, collecting their own data and representing it and solving comparison problems (Kim has 10 crayons. Sam has 3. How many more crayons does Kim have than Sam?) A parent note is coming home today with more information about this unit. This week we will be organizing and representing data (ie sorting and comparing bugs with legs and no legs), representing data using pictures, circles, and matching, asking and answering questions about data (How many more apples than bananas?) and comparing data and find how many more and how many fewer. We will also be comparing data sets with three categories and ask and answer questions about the data.

Science/Social Studies: We're starting to investigate liquids this week. We will be observing and describing four liquids (water, glue, shampoo and oil, and then learning more about their properties by investigating them in centers this week and next week. We'll be observing how they flow, how they feel, their color, whether they are opaque or transparent and how they mix with water. Lots of engaged scientists during this unit!

Word Study: New words this week are brother, sister, thing. We'll be doing some work with the ing chunk and also the /r/ sound at the end of words.

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

Kathy Zobel

First Grade

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