Dear Families,
Welcome back to school and Happy New Year! I hope everyone had a restful and relaxing holiday break from school with lots of outdoor time and opportunities to reconnect with friends and family. It was great to see the children again and hear their stories about what they did over break.
I would like to welcome Zoe Clark to our classroom this semester. Ms. Clark is our new intern and she will be with us full-time this semester. Thank you Ms. Clark for joining us. We are so excited to get to know you and welcome you to our classroom!
Here is a letter from Ms. Clark:
Hi first grade families!
My name is Zoe Clark and I will be your first grader’s student teacher this winter and spring. I am a senior at Northern Vermont University at Johnson (formally Johnson State College) and am getting my degree in Elementary and Special Education. Last semester I was with a 2nd grade placement twice a week and a special education placement twice a week. Now, I am so excited to be working with first grade. I love to teach science, engineering, and social studies classes along with social/ emotional lessons. Outside of teaching I like to perform music with local bands, ski, make art, and be with my friends and family. I am looking forward to getting to know your unique first grader this spring and gaining more teaching experience!
Best regards,
Zoe Clark
Here is our week in review:
Social-Emotional Learning:
This week, we reviewed our school expectations and practiced how to be safe, kind and responsible towards peers and adults at school. The students filled our classroom buzzy jar already! This time, we celebrated with extra play time and games.
We started a classroom buzzy jar specifically for math too. At the end of math class, we meet on the rug for a closing circle to reflect on our math learning and highlight friends who persevered, showed a growth mindset and practiced safe, kind and responsible choices to others. The students take turns complimenting each other and giving each other buzzies, which we place inside our math buzzy jar. The math buzzy jar is extra special to us because we fill it with colorful pompoms; not just yellow and black! They are purple, red, orange and blue! The students filled this jar as well! We celebrated with a new math game followed by “old favorites”.
Reading:
The students participated in partner reading this week. They had the opportunity to practice what it looks like and sounds like when we share books and take turns reading out loud to each other. They also practiced choosing “Just right” books together from our classroom partner reading library.
The students also had the opportunity to write reading responses to several read alouds. They are learning that readers think carefully about the books they read and share their understanding with words and pictures. We primarily focused upon visualization as a reading comprehension strategy. The students shared their favorite part, character or a memorable part of a book using pictures/drawings. The students also made personal connections to the books read out loud. We read the book “Enemy Pie” by Derek Munson and the students had the opportunity to write about friendship and kindness.
We also read the book “The Mitten” by Jan Brett and the students drew pictures of interesting parts to help them remember this story. They did a great job showing their understanding in pictures. What a terrific group of artists!
The students also accessed reading on razkids at school. This is a terrific online resource with books for your child to read at home. Please consider using this as your daily reading activity. Thank you.
Writing:
This week, we started writing opinion pieces and persuasive essays. This unit will last for several weeks. Throughout this unit, the students will learn how to make effective topic statements, supported by convincing evidence. They will also learn to become more independent checking for proper capitalization, spacing and ending punctuation. This week, the students wrote about an animal they would like to get and why. The challenge was to only choose one animal from a list of four available ones. Ask your child to explain which animal they wrote about and why they chose that particular animal. The choices were rabbit, bird, penguin or tiger. They did an amazing job. They are all authors and so enthusiastic about sharing their opinions!
First Grade Math:
First grade mathematicians continued to practice number sense skills and strategies this week. Our new Number Corner Calendar reflects new, and sometimes, unfamiliar ways of writing equations. The students are encouraged to learn flexible ways to express relationships between numbers while paying close attention to the symbols (and their respective meanings). For example, some of the equations introduced this week look like this, encouraging the students to also find the missing addends/subtrahends.
5=3+ __
__ -2=5
First grade mathematicians also reviewed concepts around “greater than”, “less than”, “equal to” while figuring out how many more and how many fewer.
Science:
We also started our new science unit this week. We will learn about sound and light for the next few weeks. In this unit, the students will participate in experiments, hands-on workshops and engineering challenges. We will also read many books and utilize Mystery Doug as a guide as we explore these topics.
If you have a fully charged flashlight at home and feel comfortable bringing it into school next week, please send it in on Monday. We have a few on Harmony but with multiple classrooms using them at the same time, it helps if your child has his/her own to use. We will use these flashlights to learn about shadows and light. Please place them inside a ziplock bag with your child’s name on it. Thank you for considering.
News and Reminders:
I will start mid-year math and reading assessments next week. Ms. Emily will be our Guest Teacher. Mid-year assessments will continue throughout the month of January in literacy and math.
Report cards will go out on February 11th. More information will follow as we approach this date.
We have no school on January 17th due to Martin Luther King Jr. Day
Here is a link to this week’s Bell: School Bell_Jan7
Have a great weekend,
Maria
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