Weekly Updates February 27-March 3

Hello,

We had an amazing week of training at Columbia Teacher’s College, and I’m excited to try some things out in our classroom. Ms. Desmond enjoyed her time with students, and was impressed with how well they were able to follow our routines. I’m happy to be back in the classroom though and really missed our class!

http://signup.com/go/TNwaqh

Here is the sign up link for Knowledge-a-thon​

Classroom Need:  We are in need of more pens for writing.  We use the Paper Mate: Flair Pens in black.  If you are out and about and could pick up a pack we would appreciate it!   Thank you!

Upcoming Events:

3/2: Dr. Seuss Character Day
3/10: Author's Breakfast 7:15-7:45

3/15: No School for Students
3/28 & 3/30: Portfolio Conferences 4:00-7:00
3/29: Wacky Hair Day
4/3: Sports Day
4/11: Egg Crack Off

Reading: We have been continuing to get to know our characters. We’ve been going on adventures by keeping track of when and where our stories take place, predicting what might happen next, retelling the important parts (and marking those parts with post-its so we remember) and rereading to notice even more about our characters. We’ve also been working on having conversations with our partners to learn even more about our characters by using these same strategies together.

Writing: Last week we spent some time working on making our writing readable. We have such great ideas for stories, but we realized it’s important to make sure our writing is readable so others can enjoy our writing. We worked on letter formation, spacing, capitals, and punctuation. This week we are back to writing like scientists. Students will be setting up and conducting their own experiments with partners and writing up lab reports to share their learning. They’ll start with a question and hypothesis, write the procedure, conduct the experiment and then write about their observations, results and add a conclusions. First graders are super excited to conduct their experiments!

Word Work: The new words this week are: make, thing, funny, day, will. Please have your child practice these words on a regular basis. As they become fluent with them, it’s helps them with their reading and writing.

Math:  We started our new unit this week, Comparisons and Data. In this unit students will be representing and comparing data and solving comparison problems. We’ll spend a couple of days organizing, representing and interpreting data, and then students will be conducting their own surveys in our classroom and representing their data.

Content: We are finishing up our study of solids and liquids this week. We compared solids and liquids yesterday, and will be completing an assessment on Wednesday to show all we have learned about solids and liquids.