Dear Families,
Here is our week in review:
Social-Emotional Learning:
We learned about productive self-talk this week with the help of our puppet Puppy. We learned that we can “whisper talk” to ourselves to keep small problems small and to help us focus and concentrate. Simply by re-voicing directions or expectations, we can help ourselves be better listeners. In other words, we learned that listening is more than just using your ears and eyes. We need to use our brains to concentrate on the task and carefully focus our attention. Self-talk helps us stay on track. Try it at home! Ask your child to repeat or re-voice a direction before you repeat the direction again.
Reading:
This week, the students continued building their independent reading skills. They were encouraged to practice their trick words and high frequency words during our independent reading times by reading them and writing them down on our brand new whiteboards. The students are doing a great job integrating this new reading/writing activity to our learning times. Guided reading groups also continued this week. Each group receives targeted reading instruction based upon their specific needs and are encouraged to practice these skills when they read independently.
Next week, we will participate in our school-wide mid-year reading assessments. Please make sure your child brings his/her chromebook to school fully charged on Tuesday. We will need the computers for these online reading assessments. We will also administer the traditional Fountas and Pinnell reading assessment in the next couple of weeks. I will administer these assessments on Thursday and Friday next week. Ms. Shelby will be our guest teacher. The students are so excited to see her again!
Writing:
We started our new opinion writing pieces this week. Throughout this unit, the students will learn how to write a clear argument for, or against, something they feel strongly about. This week, we started practicing the overall writing style and the topics were already provided. This week, the students wrote about their favorite season and if they would rather read a book or do math.
In writing, the students also practiced CAPS every day. CAPS stands for capitalization, appearance (ie finger-spacing and penmanship), punctuation and spelling. They made individualized badges that we taped to their desks as a visual reminder of their roles as a word detectives. Every morning, the students correct one sentence that has been written incorrectly. They are doing a fantastic job! Please encourage your child to think about CAPS when he/she writes the weekly book review. Thank you!
First Grade Math:
First grade mathematicians practiced subtraction this week. We used story problems to help us make sense of what it means to “take something away” and find the difference between numbers.
We continued finding missing addends and subtrahends as well. The students were encouraged to expand their mathematical drawings to show how they know what the missing number was. The students shared their work with the rest of the class through classroom discussions and also using our document camera.
We looked more deeply at groups of 10 and some more. We explored the differences between the numbers 12 and 21 using rekenreks and unifix cubes. The students were encouraged to visualize the difference between one group of 10 and 2 more and two groups of 10 and two more. We will continue this work next week.
Science:
The students did an amazing job sharing their Moon Journals during our morning meeting this week. We learned so much from each other and even got some ideas for how to draw the different phases of the moon. The Moon Journals are due on January 29th. Thank you.
News and Reminders:
All first graders will need their fully charged chromebooks on Tuesday for our district-wide reading assessments. Please help your child charge it at home in advance and pack it on Tuesday morning. We do not have the capabilities to charge your child’s chromebook at school. Thank you. If your child has his/her own head-phones, please pack those as well as they will need them for these assessments.
Our EA rotation has changed. For the next few weeks, we will have Art class on Mondays and Tuesdays and Music class on Thursdays and Fridays.
Mrs. Clopton will share the 10 nominated Red Clover books starting next week during our read aloud time with her. Here is the link to the books this year. Voting will occur at ABS.
There is no school on Monday, January 18th (Martin Luther King Jr. Day)
Report cards will come home with your child on Friday, January 29th.
Here's a link to this week's Bell.
Have a great weekend,
Maria
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