Sunday, June 5, 2016

Week of June 6th

Dear Families,
I'm finding it very hard to believe that we are just 3 weeks away from the end of the year. Time sure does fly!! The end of the year is always a busy time as we wrap up new learning, finish up assessments and partake in various fun events like plays and assemblies! This week marks the start of this crazy, yet exciting time. On Wednesday we will have our field trip to Sage College. It is important that each student arrive to school on time as we will be leaving as close to 9:20 as possible. Later this week we will also get a chance to see a play presented by Mrs. Riegal's 5th grade All-Stars. They always put on a good show and I'm sure this will be wonderful as well! On Friday we will host Eagle's first senior assembly. This will be a great way to honor former Eagle students and a neat way for the little ones to make some connections to the older students of BC! Our class picnic will be held on Wednesday, June 15th. All students will need to bring in a lunch from home as we will not be utilizing the cafeteria. Please bring a blanket to sit on and be prepared to be WOWed by my first grade friends! Please stay tuned for more specific information later this week or early next week. I would also like to plan a day to celebrate summer birthdays. I know we have quite a few, so I thought instead of having several parents bring in treats, we could have one day where we could celebrate ALL summer birthdays with a small ice cream party. I thought Monday, June 20th would be a good day. Please let me know if you have any objections. I plan on bringing in ice cream and toppings. If you would like to contribute anything for our ice cream birthday celebration, please let me know so that I can plan accordingly.
I also should add that we are finished with our formal spelling program. The students will no longer be responsible for completing the weekly homework packet, but I will be sending home other spelling homework for them to complete.
As you can see, we are in for a busy few weeks! If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know. Have a good week!
Kerry

Saturday, April 30, 2016

Week of May 2

Dear First Grade Families,

I hope everyone had a relaxing and enjoyable vacation. I know many students were traveling while others had fun events planned close to home. I sure hope everyone returns well rested! I'm excited to see everyone and hear all about spring break! This week we welcome a new friend into our classroom. Brooke joins us from Averill Park and we are all very excited to meet her!

I spent a few hours in our classroom today tidying up and preparing for our first day back. As I started to refill bins, I noticed that we are in desperate need of replenishing our supply of glue sticks. I will pick some up tomorrow, but if you are out and about tomorrow (or some time this week) and don't mind picking up a few for us to use I would really appreciate it. My guesstimate is that if each child could bring in 5-8 glue sticks, we should be set for the remainder of the year. Thank you in advance!

If you are interested in purchasing a t-shirt for field day, please place the order form and money in your child's folder on Monday. The deadline is quickly approaching. Please note that you are not required to purchase a t-shirt. Yellow is our team color, so if you have a yellow t-shirt at home that will be fine also.

Here's a peek into the week ahead:
Reader's Workshop: This week we will start wrapping up our unit on making inferences. We will most likely end this unit early next week with a fun inference activity that will test our knowledge of Eagle Elementary! This week we will read between the lines to infer setting/scene as well as find "clues" in various reading passages. Here are some photos of the students buddy reading. They are growing each day as readers!
  

 

 

 


Spelling: Our focus this week will be on contractions. The students will become "contraction surgeons" this week to create contractions and dissect contractions into their two word parts. Here are some pictures of the students matching up compound words.
 

 

 



 

 


Writer's Workshop: This will be our last full week of reading and writing our own poems. So far the students have written the following kinds of poems: Acrostic, shape, color, 5 senses, and Emotion. We will begin this week exploring more emotions/feelings and will even try to incorporate some rhyming into our poems. We will also start writing Cinquain and autobiography poems this week as well.

Math: We will continue to think about subtraction as we learn to subtract from a two digit number. The students will have many opportunities to explore some new math games to help them review the concepts learned in topic 11 before completing their next "Show Me."

Science/Social Studies: We finished up our Communities/Mapping unit before vacation. As a culminating activity the students worked together to create a giant map/model of a fictional community. It was so great to see the students take initiative, work together, compromise and come together to produce an extraordinary final project. If you get a moment to pop into school, be sure to check out our map displayed in the hallway under the large bulletin board. Now that the weather is starting to turn a bit nicer, we will pick up with our "seed" unit that we started in the fall. If weather permits, we will spend some time exploring in our garden to see if we can identify plant parts as well as learn their function. We will end the week by planting our very own seeds and watching them germinate.

I'm looking forward to a great week ahead!

Sunday, March 27, 2016

Week of March 28th

Dear First Grade Families,

I hope that everyone had a great holiday weekend and found some time to spend with family and friends! It's hard to believe that as we end this week we will find ourselves in the month of April - just CRAZY!!

I forgot to post pictures from our March celebration, so here they are! Thank you to all those who were good sports with our leprechaun "photo booth"! I know the kiddos had a lot of fun and I hope you did too. A BIG thank you to everyone who donated food items for our celebration. These events are not possible without your help. The students and I are very grateful!




Our Traps




 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a look at what's in store for our class this week:

Phonics: This week we will wrap up our study of bossy r. We will introduce the -ur sound as in "burn" and "turn." We will also review the -ar, -ir, -er, and -or sounds. Please note that our spelling homework will be a bit different this week. After finishing our weather unit last week, the students really wanted to use some of these words for their spelling test. We brainstormed all of our weather words together and each student independently chose his/her spelling words for the week. These words should have gone home on Thursday. If you need another copy of your child's words, please let me know and I will send another one home. Because many of these words are tricky, we will not be adding sight words to our lists this week.

Reading Workshop: All of the students are really enjoying our biography unit! They are learning so much and are growing as readers in their comprehension and understanding. As we read, we are digging deeper to gain more understanding and we are stretching our thinking as we compare & contrast , as well as make text-to-self connections. This week we will continue our study of influential women as we study Juliette Gordon Law, Harriet Beacher Stowe, Annie Oakley, Georgia O'Keeffe and Michelle Obama. Next week we will explore famous male inventors.

Math: We will wrap up Topic 9 on Monday with another "show me" activity. We do not use the word "test" during math instruction in 1st grade - it's simply a way to show me what you learned and what I need to re-teach. Along with some reteaching, we will also move onto topic 10 - adding with tens and ones. Here are the essential understandings that we will cover throughout the unit:
1. Adding groups of 10 is similar to adding numbers less than 10.
2. When adding tens to a two-digit number, only the tens digit changes.
3. There is more than one way to do a mental calculation. Techniques for doing addition mentally involve changing the numbers or the expression so the calculation is easy to do mentally.
4. The traditional algorithm for adding a two-digit number and a two-digit number starts by adding ones. Sometimes 10 ones needs to be regrouped as 1 ten. Then the tens are added.

Writer's Workshop: Last week the students finished up review writing by publishing a favorite piece. They did a phenomenal job and I am so proud of them! This week we will start a fun poetry unit. We will explore many different types of poetry and I'm sure each writer will grow stronger as their thinking will change throughout this unit. This week we will learn about 5 senses poems and acrostic poetry.

Science/Social Studies: Last week we finished our Weather unit by making our own weather reports. After viewing several local weather reports throughout our unit, each student was given an opportunity to become a meteorologist! They were SO excited! Their forecasts show creativity as well as a knowledge of weather vocabulary. After writing the reports, they made a fun craft by placing themselves inside a television. Our tv's had "bunny ears" and as you can imagine, the antenna needed a bit of explaining! They must think we grew up in the dark ages!! We will take a break from formal science instruction and move into a social studies unit on maps. We will learn about different types of maps, how to read them and even make our own maps. We will begin this unit by learning about our community and discussing citizenship.

I hope you all have a great week!
Kerry






Sunday, March 13, 2016

Week of March 14th

Dear First Grade Families,

The boys and girls have been soaking up the warmer temperatures during recess and are LOVING it! I'm hoping this nice weather is here to stay! We are gearing up for St. Patrick's day on Thursday, so please have your child wear GREEN. Thursday is also our "Eating of the greens" celebration. You are invited to join us at 11:15 for some yummy green food and a few reader's theater presentations by our class. Please let me know if you are able to attend if you haven't already. Also, please note that all leprechaun traps should be brought to school by March 16th. This will give us time to share them, put them on display and try to catch a leprechaun or two!!

Over the last two weeks, we immersed ourselves in Dr. Seuss books. Here's a picture of the class dressed as Thing 1-Thing 21!



Reading Workshop: This week we will kick off a biography unit. Our goal is to monitor for meaning within larger texts and also describe characters, setting and major events using key details. Since March is women's history month, we will kick off our learning by studying some very famous and influential women. We don't want to leave out the boys, so we will end this fun unit by studying some famous male inventors. This is a unit that will not only teach us, but will also be fun!

Word Work: For the next few weeks, we will work on words with the controlled 'r' sound or "bossy r." We will learn that the 'r' does all of the talking in words such as: her, girl, hurt....The vowel is there, but you cannot really hear it. We will begin this three week unit by looking at words with the "ar" and "ir" sounds.

Math: Last week we finished up topic 8 with a fun scavenger hunt activity where we incorporated tens and ones along with some exercise! We had A LOT of fun!

















This week we will start our next topic in math where we will be comparing and ordering numbers to 100. We will be using a hundreds chart to find numbers that are 1 more, 1 less, 10 more and 10 less than a given number.

Science: We are continuing to work on our weather unit. This week we will focus on storms. Last week we did a fun experiment where we tested out rainy day fabrics. The students really love being scientists!

















Writing: We are nearing the end of our review writing. We will work on revising our book reviews, using conjunctions and possibly publishing. Once we finish with this unit, we will begin a short unit on writing poetry.

If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask. Have a great week and hopefully we will see you on Thursday!
Kerry