Week of February 29th

Dear First Grade Families,
I cannot believe that this week marks the beginning of March! Yikes, the year is certainly flying by! I hope everyone had a chance to go outside today and enjoy the fantastic weather! Sure felt a lot like spring!

We had a GREAT week last week celebrating the 100th day of school and meeting Nibbles! Who would have known how much excitement a small little hamster could bring to our classroom! The students are enjoying checking on him each morning and the big perk is when your table gets to eat snack at his table. Although he is nocturnal, we do try to wake him up around snack time because the kids go absolutely CRAZY when they see him running on his wheel. I'm sure they are going to remember this for a while, which makes me so happy!

Here are some pictures from our 100th day celebration...

Here's a peek at the week ahead:

Reading Workshop:  This week we will meet some silly characters by reading many Dr. Seuss books. His birthday is on Wednesday and we have lots of fun activities planned to celebrate this wonderful children's author. On Wednesday, we will kick off our Dr. Seuss fun with "Wacky Wednesday!" The students may choose to dress 'wacky' if they choose (backwards clothing, wacky socks, two different shoes, be creative!).

Phonics: This week we will continue learning about nouns, but will take it one step further by learning about plural nouns. There will be spelling this week! We will learn the rules for adding -s, -es and -ies to the ends of singular nouns.

Writing Workshop: This week we will continue writing our reviews by adding small moment stories as a means for persuasion. We will also learn how to hook our readers by crafting catchy introductions and conclusions. The students will also spend some time working with their partners to help each other give their writing check-ups.

Math: We are in the middle of our place value/base 10 unit. We are learning that sets of 10 an be perceived as single entities. In a standard numeral, the tens are written to the left of the ones. They also discovered that decade numbers to 100 are built on groups of ten. When there are only tens, counting by 10s can be used to find out how many there are in all. When counting objects are grouped in sets of 10 and leftovers (ones), counting the groups of ten and adding ones tells how many there are in all. We have also learned that numbers greater than 10 can be represented as the sum of the tens and the ones. Numbers greater than 10 can be named in more than one way and have the same value.

Science: Last week we took a small break from our Weather unit as we focused on President's day. This week our study of weather will resume as we explore clouds.