Weekly Update

Dear Families,

Happy New Year and Welcome back to school! I hope you all had a great vacation and enjoyed spending time together. I also hope you had the opportunity to enjoy the outdoors together. Winter in Vermont can be long and cold, but it can also be absolutely lovely when there is time for outdoor activities!
School is back in full swing already. Reading and writing assessments will be administered in the next few weeks into February. I am looking forward to sharing this information with you, but I hope you are all seeing the tremendous growth these fantastic 1st and 2nd grade students already show on a daily basis.
In Reader’s Workshop, the students will continue to solidify their understanding of character traits and character change in the stories we read. We are beginning to connect reading and writing more and I encourage the students to once gain read as a writer and write as a reader. By that I mean, that when we read, we want to pay attention to the sentence structure, the words chosen, and the layout and format of the text as well as the content of the story. We can learn a lot by closely monitoring the change in sentence lengths, for example, as different ideas or stories are told. When we write as readers, we carefully re-read what we already wrote before we feel completely satisfied that we did our very best. We take the time to think about our audience and pay attention to how we organized our thoughts and ideas so they are clear to others as well. We also make sure that be “backed up”, or justified our thinking and writing. In a couple of weeks, we will shift gears a bit, as our unit on “The Moon and the Night Sky” begins and the students will explore non-fiction books. In the month of January we will also continue our author study of Dr. Seuss, which culminates with a trip to the Flynn for “Seussical: The Musical” on January 25th.

In Writer’s Workshop, the students started podcasting their small moment stories before vacation. We will continue these podcasts, so please visit our podcasting site if you have yet to listen to your child’s story. The students will complete their stories with a beginning, middle, and end, and after that unit, they will learn about structured literature response writing.

In math, 1st graders are “traveling” to Antarctica to learn all about measuring through the study of penguins. We are very excited about this very hands-on unit and look forward to sharing our knowledge with you. We “started” our trip today, officially. Our passports were created yesterday and today we played a game called “Traveling to Antarctica” with our partners. We had only $100 to spend and the plane ride cost $15! Oh, how we wish that was true…..As the students learn more about money, time, measuring (inches and pounds); please encourage them to make reasonable estimates and connections between ideas and real-life situations. For example, today, we discussed if a plane ticket to Antarctica could cost only $100 in real life. What familiar items cost about $100? A car? A loaf of bread? A bike? These types of discussions make meaningful connections between math on paper and the math we experience all around us every day. Please know that 1st grade mathematicians will not take any math homework games home until the end of this unit, which is at the end of the month.
Both 1st and 2nd grade mathematicians are continuing their work on dyads, or partnerships in math, and the importance of metacognition. They are learning powerful strategies on how to think about their own thinking, how to recognize mistakes and ways to correct them. Way to go!

If you are interested in volunteering for our next 4Winds class, which is scheduled for January 27th, please contact Lori Ledak at pledak@comcast.net Thank you!

Lastly, we started our science inquiry tasks this week. The students received their science journals and on a weekly basis in the classroom, they will experiment in science on different topics. We have started fine-tuning our observational skills. We sorted various objects this week and we described them as scientists. Please ask your child to explain. Our team wiki has many science-related games and challenges for you and your child to do at home. Click here for a direct link.
Our next unit in science will be a team-wide immersion in “The Moon and the Night Sky”. Starting the week of February 18th, the students will begin their Moon Journals at home. The students will be asked to observe the moon at night and draw a picture of it and write about its different phases. I have already added a moon widget to the blog so you can check its current phase (in case you want to get a head start, or it is a cloudy night). I have also created a new folder on the team wiki entitled Moon and Sky so students can play games, check out NASA’s daily space picture and learn about the Moon Landing (which, by the way has a close connection to Sweden). Go to the wiki at www.inspirefirstgrade.pbworks.com and look on the right sidebar, in navigation window. There you will see various yellow folders for different topics. Follow the links; eventually the folder will open into a new window for you to access all the games and sites. The last click is a regular "blue link". Happy science! Click here for a direct link.

Have a great rest of the week! It is wonderful to be back with the students again.

Regards,
Maria McCormack