We said good-bye to our friend Kaylie today as she gets ready to move to Georgia tomorrow! We will miss her!  Skylar was our student of the week. She wants to be a vet when she grows up! Raine was our social skill student of the week.

Next Friday is the 100th day of school. Please send your child to class with a baggie filled with 100 small objects.

The following Friday is our Valentine’s day party. I will send a list of the students’ names home on Monday.

We completed our unit 5 math test today-which means we are half way through our math books! You will be receiving their old math journals soon. Next week we will start a unit that focuses on learning our addition and subtraction facts.

Please look for a paper in your child’s backpack that talks about Hygiene kits we are going to make for the people in Haiti. First grade will be packing the kits after all the materials come in.

Monday is day 6! We’ll start the week off right with book buddies and music! Have a wonderful weekend!

I just realized that I did not post a Friday message, nor did I send out last week’s blogs via email! So sorry! Sometimes my brain misses a beat!
We are off to a great start this week! I have still been testing for reading-a very big job! The kiddos have worked so quietly and independently while I meet with each of them individually to check their reading levels. You should be so proud of your kiddos! Everyone is making great progress!
Ask your child about the Hibernation book and how frustrated and confused I was because it was missing the text features to help me locate information! The children got a kick out of me not being able to find the information I needed! They had copies of the book today that did have the text features and guess what? They found what they were looking for in the book!

We are gearing up to learn our addition and subtraction facts to ten. By the end of first grade they should know the +1, +0, and compliments of 10 (6+4, 7+3). I hope they will also know most of the basic facts to 10. You’ll be hearing more about what we are doing in class soon!

Just a heads up that next Friday is the 100th day of school. We will be having a celebration! I’ll be sending a note home to remind everyone. On that day students need to bring in a collection of 100 things! Fun, Fun!!

Tomorrow is day 3-gym class! Have a good evening!

I hope everyone had a restful long weekend. I know I sure enjoyed mine!

We wrote letters to our buddy Derek today. His last day with us will be on Friday. We wish him all the best and will miss him!

We also learned that text features can help us preview a non-fiction book for a specific topic. I used the text features to help me figure out that the book I was looking at was perfect for information about frogs!

Reading groups are shut down this week as I do the mandated mid-year reading assessments. Your child will not have reading homework this week because of this. There will also be no word work homework.

In math we continued to work on addition facts. We played a game today that involved addition, but also required us to notice “chance”. See if your child can tell you about the dice rolling game.

I forgot to mention last week that our buddy Max was the student of the week and the social skill star! Way to go Max! Max wants to be a football player when he grows up!

Tomorrow we walk to the public library. Please dress warmly! Have a wonderful evening!

Happy Friday! What awesome workers we have had this week! You should see the writing projects that your children are creating during Writer’s Workshop! I am so proud of all of them. This week we finished our thank you letters. You will be seeing them next week in your child’s backpack. They turned out great!

We made flip books during Core as we looked through a non-fiction book. On the outside they wrote their text feature and on the inside they wrote how the feature helped them.

We also read about Dr. King this week. We made doves to remind us that he used peaceful strategies to change the world.

In math we are learning different strategies to solve number stories. We are also working on place value. Remind your child that when finding the place value, they should look at the number from right to left. (opposite of reading)

Next week we go to the public library on Wednesday. Please send your child with a hat and mittens! It is important to send those items every day because we do go outside on many of these cold days.

Have a wonderful weekend. No school on Monday! We’ll see you Tuesday-day3-gym!

Happy Monday everyone! Hope the Flat Stanleys made it home today without any rips or tears! They are due back during the month of March. It will be so fun to see where they go on their adventures!

Today we began the prewriting for our thank you letters. We learned about the friendly letter guy. His picture taught us the four parts of a letter-the greeting, the date, the body, and the closing. We also learned a song about the four parts of a letter. We then wrote our thoughts down on a prewriting organizer. Tomorrow we will write the rough drafts of our letters.

In math we added larger numbers together using base 10 blocks to aide us. This was an introductory lesson to adding two digit numbers.

We had fun exploring liquids today. We learned the words viscous and fluid to describe liquids. Can you believe the vocabulary we are learning in first grade? This is in the state standards! See if your child can tell you about the two different types of solids.

Have a great evening!

Happy Friday! We survived our first week back from a long break. Everyone worked so hard this week!

We compared and contrasted fiction and non-fiction books and the parts of a book in each kind has as we learned about text features.

We are learning how to write a letter. Yesterday we wrote down three gifts we got over the holidays and who the gifts were from. On Monday we will begin drafting a thank you letter to one of the people.

On Monday, your child will be bringing home a “Flat Stanley”. Please see the note attached to him about a fun project we are doing to learn about the United States and maps.

Mikaylas was our student of the week. She wants to be a nurse when she grows up! Way to go Mikaylas. Taylor was our Social Skill star this week! Keep up the good work Taylor.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Happy New Year! It was great to see everyone back at school yesterday! We dove right in and got back to work immediately!

Today was our crazy day 6. Our book buddies read us a story and we listened for the literary elements as they read to us (see snowman paper that came home today).

In Core, we saw a fun video called “Look it Up” as a preview for our upcoming unit on text features in non-fiction books. See if your child can tell you a text feature! (title, table of contents, index, etc.)

In math we are learning about place value and how the value of a number depends on the place it is. This is a tricky concept for some!

We are exploring liquids in science this week. We compared water and glue today. Fun stuff!

Thanks for everyone guiding your children to a different activity in the word work books last night! There were lots of fun creative ways to work on the words! Here is my favorite: Grace made the words in whipped cream and then ate them! Yum!

Stay warm this evening! Friday is spirit day!