Thursday, December 19, 2013

Lunch after vacation

Hi Everyone!  Please use the link below to sign up for lunch after the holiday.

Lunch Menu

Our breakfast tomorrow is at 8:45 after school-wide morning meeting.  Please feel free to join us while the students have breakfast!

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Gingerbread Houses

We had an awesome time creating our gingerbread houses this afternoon.  Thank you so much to all of you who could join us!


Tuesday, December 17, 2013

Magnetic North

Through our social studies unit about mapping we have learned about the compass rose and magnetic north.  We watched a fascinating video yesterday about how foxes use magnetic north to plan their trajectory (how high/low/far/close they jump) while they hunt for food in the winter.  We were amazed that a fox could hunt successfully while the ground is covered in three feet of snow.  We were also very excited to learn that animals use magnetic north like we do!

Monday, December 16, 2013

Four Winds

We were so lucky to start our week with a Four Winds presentation from Mrs. Puttlitz and Mr. Palagonia.  We were even LUCKIER to have Mrs. Puttliz's whacky scientist sister visit to teach us all about decomposition.  We broke apart logs and wrote about what we learned in our Four Winds journals.




Upcoming:
- Wednesday afternoon 1:50pm- Gingerbread houses in the cafeteria.  If you've sent in paperwork indicating that you're joining us, Mrs. Troia has been notified and you're all set!

-Friday morning 8:45; holiday breakfast in the classroom.  Parents are welcome to attend. 

Friday, December 13, 2013

Text to Text

We are awesome at making text to text connections!  We were reading this book yesterday,




and read the sentence, "And with that, the wind turned cold and the sky became dark.  The first snowflake fell."

Four first grade hands went up in the air to comment that the sentence was similar to a line in our poem from last week.   In First Snowflake, we read, "Snowflake, Snowflake blowing into town..." 

We made the connection that each text was about the first snow of the season.

WOW!

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Awesome Estimation

We have added estimation as a new part to our math learning every day.  We spend about 5 minutes at the beginning of math visiting www.esitmation180.com to estimate some pretty tough things.  Yesterday, we felt SO successful as estimators because we used many things we already knew to figure out the EXACT answer.  Can you believe it?!?  It was SO exciting to see that the answer revealed was the same number as our estimation/(calculation)! 

We started on Monday with this:




Our estimations ranged from 15-50. 

Tuesday's picture was this:




We used information we knew to make our best guess. We knew there were 10 tissues in each small package, we used the arrow of our mouse to "meausure" this tissue box and thought it was about 8 arrows.  We know 8, 10x is 80 so that was our estimation.

Answer was... 85.  SO CLOSE!

Wednesday's picture was this:


Again, we used what we knew to make a good guess.  We knew there were 85 tissues in each box.  We figured out that even though we could only see 8 boxes, there HAD to be 12 because there were some hidden that you couldn't see.  We knew we couldn't count by 85's because that is too hard. (Although, someone did suggest using a calculator we decided that wouldn't be an estimation.)  We thought that 80 was a close enough number to count by, so we used our number grid to count by 8's 12x.  Then, we added a zero because it was supposed to be 80.  Next, we went back and counted by 5's 12x for the extra 5 tissues we didn't count before. We added those two numbers together by using what we know about counting by 10's... and... guessed the correct number!  WOW! 

The first graders absolutely LOVE estimating and are so excited to see what we're going to be thinking about each day.

Wednesday, December 11, 2013

Close Read

We have been working hard to read our texts closely.  It is especially important to read technical texts closely because they often give specific directions and/or instructions.

Our first graders are hard at work to read closely:




If you'd like to contribute to our holiday celebration, please follow the link below:

Holiday Celebration Sign-Up

We also have our gingerbread house making activity Wednesday, December 18th.

Tuesday, December 10, 2013

Holiday Breakfast

Our holiday celebration breakfast will be Friday, December 20th at 8:45am as soon as school-wide morning meeting.  Many of you have expressed interest in coming and parents are invited, so we hope you can make it.  Please look for an email from Sign-Up Genius to see how you can help our celebration.

Thanks for your continued support of our classroom!

To link directly to our sign-up please click below:

Sign-Up Genius Holiday Celebration


Monday, December 9, 2013

Skip Over

We have been working very hard to skip-over words that we don't immediately know while we're reading and finish the sentence.  Finishing the sentence is important to do, instead of staying stuck on a word, because it can help us figure out that tricky word.  After we figure it out, we go back and re-read the entire sentence to practice reading smoothly. 

Our WOW word this week is festive.  We had lots of examples of how festive we've been so far this holiday season.  We are moving on to the short "o" family in SWR.  Our word families this week are __ot and ___op.  Our red word is for.  

We are practicing measuring with rulers and tape measures in math.  Today, we completed a bar graph representing the height of children in our room.  It was very fun to compare our heights and learn about the heights that most first graders are.  We had a wide range!  



Technical texts are still our focus and we will be reading Bat Loves the Night all week and answering comprehension questions about it as well as filling out graphic organizers to help us with our thinking.  We will also be reading technical texts about maps!  




Please fill out the lunch menu for next week below:
Lunch Menu   

Friday, December 6, 2013

Technical Texts Continued

Today we had a great time reading another technical text- newspapers!  The first graders couldn't believe all of the different things they could read about.  (I think they were most excited about the fliers and holiday story insert however...). :)  They found titles, headlines, captions, articles, advertisements and pet features.  They really wanted to take them home, but I assured them that each of their houses receive a Colchester Sun and they could look for it at home.

Check out their work!



Thursday, December 5, 2013

Technical Texts

We practiced more with technical texts today when we read a Time for Kids issue.  We learned about being good to our bodies and staying healthy and strong.  We read about how to keep our heart healthy, bones healthy, stomach healthy and muscles healthy.  We also discussed how headlines, captions, pictures and charts help us understand technical texts better.


These students work to read a technical text together.  One student reads, while the other points to the word.  Partner reading is a great way to practice!



 

Wednesday, December 4, 2013

Lunch Menu

Hi Everyone!  I'm so sorry I've neglected to send you the lunch menu for next week.  Here it is!  Please fill it out by Friday morning!

Lunch Menu

Reading Comprehension

We have been working to use all of the reading strategies we know when we're reading!  These first graders are practicing to read with expression:





and these first graders are acting out the vocabulary word "peer": 




There is a notice going home in your child's folder regarding a gingerbread activity coming up.  Please fill out the form and return it to school!

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Technical Texts

Our focus this trimester is Technical Texts.  These texts are social studies and science texts or informational materials with a non-narrative structure.  We will also be learning about this in writing as we learn about How-To writing and practice our own! 

You can support this at home by finding examples of technical texts and sharing them with your child.  The holidays are a wonderful time to do this as I'm sure you'll be preparing lots of favorite recipes (a great technical text!) and putting together many toys or games with instructions (another technical text)! 

As you're reading, work to identify the main idea and key details, identify headings, and try to retell.  Having many opportunities to access these texts will make strong first grade readers. 

Here are some first graders working with technical texts today:



 

Monday, December 2, 2013

December

Wow! We came to school and looked at our calendar and we couldn't believe it was December already!  We only have three weeks until our holiday break and we are so excited about all of the things we will be learning!

Our WOW word this week is immense.  We had fun using immense in sentences this morning.  In SWR we are learning about the plural "s".  Adding "s" to the end of a word shows that there is more than one.  We are finding SO many examples of this as we read as well.  We love seeing connections in so many areas.  

In our reading groups we are using many strategies to figure out words.  We are moving beyond sounding words out and trying to figure out what the word might be by looking at the first letter and taking our best guess.  This is challenging for the first graders, but as our words get longer, it's a lot harder to sound them out!  


In math we are measuring items using a real "foot" and comparing lengths of objects.  We had fun measuring items in our classroom today.



We began a study of maps in social studies today.  I'm sure your children will be anxious to share with you what they learned today!