Pictures from school

 Playing together during explore time:

Partner Reading:

Waiting for "Salty:

Working on Thanksgiving projects:

Family Newsletter

 Dear Families,

Here is our week in review:

Social-Emotional Learning:

• This week, the students continued participating in many different learning activities around kindness.  They made special kindness cards to their buddies in second grade, which we delivered to them in person.  They also made some extra kindness cards to each other in class.  It feels great to spread kindness randomly around us!

• The students at ABS filled the school Bee Hive again for being safe, kind and responsible.  This time, we celebrated together by stopping what we were doing to just play when we heard Ms. Filion’s announcements on the intercom.  The suspense throughout the day was certainly exciting as the children eagerly waited for this special event!

• The students at ABS participated in a special Vermont-wide competition to name new plow trucks that were purchased for the state.  The name “Salty” won at ABS.  This week, the plow truck “Salty” visited our school.  The students had a chance to see “their” truck and meet its driver Sean.  They hope to see “Salty” on the roads in Williston this winter.

• In connection with our focus and learning around kindness, we deepened our understanding of empathy this week as well.  Through read alouds and puppet shows, the students gained new understanding and discovered the importance of being able to show empathy.  Puppy and Snail, our two favorite puppets from Second Step, helped the students realize how important it is to show kindness even when really unexpected behaviors and choices occur.

Reading:

• This week, the students continued practicing their independence and stamina while Ms. Emily and I provided small group instruction in reading.  As a class, we focused on gaining new strategies around vowel sounds.  The students are encouraged to try both the long and the short vowel sounds when deciphering a challenging, new word.

• The students also continued partner reading in class.  They took turns reading with each other and used whisper voices.  Reading out loud can be tricky, but it is important for emerging readers as it allows them to slow down, attend to the text on the page and start paying attention to their own fluency.

Writing:

• We took a little break from our “All About Me” books this week to focus on kindness and writing related to that specific topic.  

• The students also did writing related to Thanksgiving.  They wrote about things they are thankful for.  Their beautiful projects are inside their Home Folders today.  They worked hard.  We hope you like them!

• We celebrated the publishing of the students’ personal narratives.  They had the opportunity to read their stories to partners in class.

First Grade Math:

• First grade mathematicians continued their work on fractions.  This week, they divided circles into two equal halves. They also explored quarters.  We will continue work around quarters and fourths after the holiday break.

• First grade mathematicians also played new games for practicing and building an understanding of doubles and doubles plus 1/minus 1.  Building a solid understanding of double facts and understanding the number sequence help all mathematicians efficiently solve increasingly complex calculations.

• First graders also worked in small groups to build a better understanding of numbers and counting, both forward and backwards.

Science:

• Science was all about turkeys and Thanksgiving this week.Ask your child to explain what we learned from Mystery Doug!

News and Reminders:

• We have Thanksgiving Break next week so there will be no school.  We return again on Monday, November 29th.  We hope you have a safe and relaxing holiday break.  There are so many things to be thankful for.

• If your child has received his/her first Covid vaccine, please notify our school  nurse.   You can email her at slove@cvsdvt.org

• Please unpack  your child’s  Home  Folder before sending it back on Mondays.   Looking through your child’s  work from the school week is also an excellent way for your child  to share his/her learning in different classrooms, review concepts  and celebrate their hard work.  Thank you for acknowledging their work.

• Here's a link to this week's Bell

Have a great weekend,

Maria

Family Newsletter

 Dear Families,

Here is our week in review:

Social-Emotional Learning:

• This week, we focused on kindness at our school.   The students were encouraged to use kind and polite words when interacting with each other and teachers.   They started making a kindness chain in class with Ms.  Emily, linking words  and acts of kindness written on paper strips which were  linked together.  They also drew pictures and wrote kind words to each other in class.

• Through a series of lessons, the students learned more about the different feelings people experience.   They practiced identifying different feelings by carefully observing facial expressions,  body language and making sense of the context.   We listened to “The Feeling Song”  again too.  They love this song.

• Please see the following message from Ms. Nicole:

PBiS at ABS News

• Seeking Donations: Click here to learn about a service learning project some students have been working on at Allen Brook School!

• Whole School Celebration: We Filled The Hive by being Safe, Kind and Responsible. We will celebrate on Monday with Stop, Drop and Play!

• Special Visitor: Allen Brook School students and staff will get to meet “Salty” a State Plow Truck named by our students. We will have a special visit on November 17th!

• Kindness Day: World Kindness Day is November 13th. Allen Brook will be celebrating with Kindness Week! See here for more information. Feel free to encourage some of these activities at home!

• Have questions about PBiS at ABS or any of the above mentioned happenings? Contact Nicole at npfende@cvsdvt.org

Reading:

• The students participated in partner reading this week using decodable books.  They took turns reading out loud to each other.  They did great using whisper voices.

• The students continued reading “just right” books this week.  We also continued working on improving our trick word automaticity.  You might recall, these words occur often in books and many of them cannot be sounded out so it is important that young readers learn to recognize them so they can read them with automaticity.

• This week, first grade readers were working on utilizing many different reading strategies at the same time when encountering an unfamiliar, or challenging word.  They are encouraged to look at the first few letters of the word, rather than guessing based upon the supporting picture.  They are encouraged to get their mouths ready to say the sounds of each letter, or letter combination.  Finding parts of a word that they already know helps these young readers read more challenging words!  Next week, we will look more deeply at the different vowel sounds, both the long sounds and the short sounds for each vowel. 

• Thank you for supporting razkids and daily reading with your child at home.  We see steady growth in accuracy but also in the students’ confidence and love of reading!  It is wonderful to see this development.  We hope you see this at home too.

Writing:

• First grade authors  wrapped  up their personal narratives this week.   They created  covers for  their stories  and made sure they could read their own writing.  They also added thinking bubbles  and speech bubbles to their stories.  

• First grade authors continued on improving their decoding skills in spelling.   They practiced tapping out the sounds to  independently write.

First Grade Math:

• First grade mathematicians practiced fractions this week.   They applied their understanding of equal  parts  while folding papers into two equal halves.   I hope you saw them inside their Home Folders.   Next week, we will explore  other shapes  and create  two  equal parts.

• First grade mathematicians also improved their understanding of  groups of ten  while exploring  our “Days  in School” chart.   This week,  we passed  the 50th day of school.  The students were encouraged to show 50 in groups  of tens  using their math hands, writing equations and number bonds and visualizing 50 using our 100 chart.   They discovered  that 50 is half of 100!

• The students also  learned a new game and I think it  quickly became a new favorite  one.   It is called “50 or Bust!”.   The students were encouraged to anchor their sums to fives and tens to make their calculations more efficient and accurate.  Ask your child to  explain.   Their game boards are inside their Home Folders.  

Science:

• First graders learned about famous structures in our world. These included Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, and the Flatiron Building in New York. We discussed some characteristics of each structure and how we could use that to build our own structures. We learned about a famous architect that uses triangles to create his structures. His name is Buckminster Fuller and he built a geodesic dome. We learned about how architects make blueprints of what they want their structures to look like. We then created our own blueprints for our structures we want to build using toothpicks and marshmallows. They worked with a partner to come up with a sketch of what they both wanted their structure to look like.  We also used our blueprints to actually build our structure out of marshmallows and toothpicks. They loved building their structures. It was so  much fun!

• We learned about how basketball was invented. We then became our own inventors and created our own board games. We hope your child will inspire you at home to play some board games together.  Some students chose to take their board games home today; other students will bring them home sometime next week.

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News and Reminders:

• Ms.  Emily finished her  last solo week  today!  Thank you  Ms.  Emily for providing such engaging learning opportunities  in our class.  I  will  be back  as the lead  teacher  on Monday.   Ms.  Emily will finish her internship with us on December 10th. 

• If your child has received his/her first Covid vaccine, please notify our school  nurse.   You can email her at slove@cvsdvt.org

• We have no school  between 11/22-11/26 due to our Thanksgiving Break.

• Please unpack  your child’s  Home  Folder before sending it back on Mondays.   Looking through your child’s  work from the school week is also an excellent way for your child  to share his/her learning in different classrooms, review concepts  and celebrate their hard work.  Thank you for acknowledging their work.

• Here's a link to this week's Bell 

Have a great weekend,

Maria

Pictures from our week together at school

 Science with Ms. Emily:

Learning with our buddies from second grade:

Using dominos to help us practice our math skills and concepts:

Science: Building and creating together:

Family Newsletter

 Dear Families,

Thank you for taking the time to meet with me online for our parent-teacher conferences this week.  It was wonderful to see you all and share about your child’s learning and progress at school.

Here is our week in review:

Social-Emotional Learning:

• This week, the students participated in new games to practice active listening skills.  One game is called “What’s missing?”.  The students have to carefully look at another participant in the game to figure out what is missing when this latter person returns to the circle. The players take turns guessing.  The students really enjoyed this game.

• The students continued to find mindful moments throughout the day, not just during our scheduled times.  They are encouraged to relax their bodies and voices to focus on breathing and positive thinking.  This is important for all sorts of activities in our classroom.

• Another focus this week was on taking turns speaking and lowering our voices.  We have noticed that the noise level has increased in our classroom.  That makes it hard for everyone to learn.  The students are encouraged to “listen the first time” and “read the room” before calling out or interrupting a friend/teacher.  Many times we can simply slow down and take a moment to reflect before starting a new task more independently. Ms. Nicole joined our classroom to help the students create strategies and techniques for doing this. Thank you, Ms. Nicole!

Reading:

• The students continued working on building their independence during our readers’ workshop classes.  This week, they were encouraged to practice their trick words (words readers cannot sound out) in addition to their decodable words.  They are doing a fantastic job applying the skills and strategies learned in Fundations to our reading classes.  We hope you see this at home too.  We are so proud of these first grade readers!

• We used the Piggie and Gerald books, written and illustrated by Mo Willems, to discuss the importance of the setting in telling a story.  The students discovered that these books do not include a setting at all in the pictures.  Most other books we read in first grade have a clear setting.  They created different settings using pictures for the characters in Mo Willems’s books.  Ask your child to explain where we placed them. They are very creative (hint: Pigeon was on the moon and in a big city).

• Thank you for reading with your child daily.  While it is challenging for us to share decodable/just right books with families, we hope your child will share his/her library books with you.  We also hope your child will access raz-kids for daily reading at home.  This online resource addresses reading accuracy, fluency and comprehension, which will help your child build confidence as a reader.  It is a highly engaging platform.  Let me know if you need help accessing this. I am happy to share the log-in information again.

Writing:

• The students are adding more pages and details to their personal narratives.  They are currently learning different ways to “wrap up” their stories.  This week they also learned to add dialogue in the form of speech bubbles (and thinking bubbles) to their conversations in their stories.

• The students are practicing their trick words weekly.  They are encouraged to look at our word wall in the classroom to help spell these words since writers cannot sound these words out.  They are doing a great job recognizing these words.

• The students are also practicing tapping out the sounds they hear in the words they wish to write.  Their independence and willingness to try their best spelling are improving every day! 

First Grade Math:

• First grade mathematicians continued working on number sense and building their understanding of parts of numbers this week.  They are working hard!  We applied our strategies using dominos this week.  The students were encouraged to use various addition strategies when playing different domino games.  For example, they “counted on” from a larger number to find the value of a whole domino.  In other words, we hope that first grade mathematicians feel comfortable starting at a larger number to count on rather than counting all the dots on the domino from one.  The students also noticed “double facts” within the dot patterns on the dominos.  Recognizing double facts help us break the numbers into more manageable parts; thus, helping us solve our math problems more efficiently.

• First grade mathematicians also learned and practiced that equations can be written vertically.

• This month’s Number Corner Calendar introduces the students to fractions.  In first grade, they will learn about “wholes’ and “halves”.  They will learn that fractions must be equal parts.  Next week, they will apply these concepts using various paper shapes to create “wholes” and “halves”.

Science:

• We have created our own apple trappers to “pick” apples from our class orchard. We followed a mystery science and engineered are own pickers to collect apples.

• We learned about structures, objects, and materials this week.  We built our own bridges using index cards after reading Iggy Peck: Architect written by Andrea Beaty.

• Additionally, we did a scavenger hunt around the room to find different objects and figure out what material that object is made out of.  We learned about un-sturdy and sturdy structures during a scientist meeting while exploring what materials are best for creating a strong or sturdy structure.

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News and Reminders:

• Here's a link to this week's Bell.

• It is getting cold outside.  Please make sure your child comes to school with a warm jacket.  Sweatshirts and smaller fleece jackets are not enough.  Thank you.

• Ms. Emily will conduct another solo week next week.  I will support our small group work throughout the week as well. 

Have a great weekend,

Maria