Dear Families,
Here is our week in review:
Social-Emotional Learning:
We focused on spreading kindness around us. We practiced asking for help politely and waiting our turn patiently.
We learned more about “whole body listening” this week. We primarily focused upon “eyes watching”. This means that we have eye contact with the speaker. Looking at the speaker helps us pay better attention so we understand what is going on and what is being asked of us. We also learned that giving eye contact to the speaker is polite.
We continued our daily mindfulness practices. We colored in our mandala coloring books, listened to calming music and even had a chance to look at some pretty amazing videos from outer space from NASA satellites orbiting the earth!
We started our Hopes & Dreams projects. The students listened to a book and as a class we discussed what we hope to learn and do at school this year. The students shared their ideas publicly, then wrote them down. We will create a display outside our classroom when we are done. We will also share these at our upcoming parent-teacher conferences.
Reading:
The students continued practicing quiet reading, navigating between “just right” books and raz-kids.
We focused on building our reading stamina this week. We talked about the importance of challenging yourself to read just a little bit longer every day, or a little bit more challenging book every day. We ended each class with a reflection, a time when the students could reflect on their own reading.
We continued our study of Mercy Watson. We continued working on finding character traits in the books we read.
We will start a weekly reading log next week. This reading log will go home in your child’s Home Folder on Tuesdays. We hope your child will read at home every day and log what type of reading was completed. The log will show if it was a book, a book online or if an adult read to them. The completed log comes back to school on Tuesdays. Mrs. Benoit’s class and my class will collectively work together to “read our way to the Moon”. For each reading log completed, the student will help the two classes on our way to the Moon. Happy Reading!
Writing:
We continued writing our personal narratives. This week, we learned about transition words and how we can stretch our stories over many, many pages--just like real authors!!
Science:
We launched our new science unit this week. We will study space systems and patterns for the next few weeks. We will learn about the moon, the sun and the stars. More will follow next week.
We launched this unit in our Friday Workshops outside with the second graders. We built rockets and had a rocket launch out on the field! We also learned about the moon landing this week. WOW! We love science!
First Grade Math:
We focused on number sense this week, composing and decomposing numbers to 20. We played a game called Number Rack Detectives, a game that encourages the students to find the missing addend in an equation to 10 while using a rekenrek to help us.
We are encouraging the students to use visual tools to help solve problems rather than relying on finger counting. We hope the students will “see” numbers as wholes of smaller parts. We primarily use rekenreks, dice/dot patterns and 10 frames. We started relying more on 100 grids and number bonds too this week.
Many children did not have their math tool kits this week. Please make sure your child bring his/her entire math tool bag back to school again. Thank you!
News and Reminders:
We received an update from Google regarding updates they have made to Google Meets to improve performance. It looks like it will help students on Chromebooks.
In short, it means that Meet will work better on Chromebooks.
To realize these improvements, devices need to be updated to the latest version of Chrome OS- 86.0.4240.183. If a student reboots their Chromebook, it should update. To be sure they have the latest OS version, you can use this link for how to manually update their devices.
Since we are starting weekly reading logs next week, your child’s Home Folder is not due back until the following Tuesday, along with the reading log. Thank you.
Here's a link to this week's Bell.
Have a great weekend,
Maria
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