Weekly Update

Dear families,
I hope you have all had a great week.  I have already posted many times this week with pictures from special events so I hope you have the opportunity to scroll down and check out older posts, as those include pictures.  Thank you (and have fun)

In the last few weeks, the students have been busy working on their small moment stories in Writer's Workshop, stories that tell a very specific personal narrative of something that already happened to them.  Some students have worked on stories about a first bike ride or a trip to the ocean, while others have worked on stories about  losing a first tooth.  Throughout this writing process, the students learned how to effectively add details to words and pictures, by using colors, labels, action words and adjectives to name a few.  The students have editing partners and they check each others' writing pieces before handing them in to me.  They check to make sure the writing makes sense and is grammatically correct.  This week, we started creating covers for these stories.  We began by previewing covers made by already established authors.  We looked at their covers and discussed what we noticed about the colors, the text and the layout.  We discovered that authors select titles that connect with the plot and they also have pictures that match the stories.  We also discovered that authors are very creative in the actual layout of their book covers.  For examples, some titles are in bubble letters and some titles are written diagonally across the page.  We cannot wait to show you our covers and books.  

Reader's Workshop was short this week due to our 4Winds class and another science class taught by Ms. Dani.  I hope you get a chance to scroll down on this blog and read more about our 4Winds class and look at some pictures.  Thank you parent volunteers for making these terrific classes available to our students.  Ms. Dani continued our work on scientific observations.  The students learned about different kinds of leaves and used their science journals to record their observations.  Here is a Voicethread highlighting their learning.

In math, first grade mathematicians continued working on number sense and fluency.  Please visit our 1st grade blog for more updates and pictures.

Lastly, I wanted to remind you all to sign up for our parent-teacher conferences.  I have linked the sign-up wiki in the sidebar of this blog.  Please let me know if you need any help or if the times do not work for you. 

Regards,
Maria