Pictures from our week together at school

 

Sharing our writing in class:

Ms. Clark reading a book to the class:

Family Newsletter

 Dear Families,

Here is our week in review:

Social-Emotional Learning:

• This week, we continued to learn about the differences between “rude silly” and “fun silly”.  If you recall, the students are learning the times during our day when they can be silly and loud, and the times when they cannot (because that behavior interferes with other peoples’ learning). Ms. Nicole visited our class for some role playing to show this.  We had so much fun and we learned so much.  Thank you, Ms. Nicole for helping us!

• We also learned about the importance of having good and safe manners during snack and lunch time.  We talked about the importance of sitting still during meal times, not talking with food in our mouths and not playing with the food.  We read a book about a penguin and his animal friends who helped us visualize this.

• We are also learning about the “Zones of Regulation” in our class.  The zones help us understand our own needs and feelings, but also that of others.  They help us show empathy and compassion towards others when we see/hear unexpected behaviors or choices.  Throughout the day, people move through different feelings.  There are multiple strategies we can use to help us regulate our feelings as we move away from “the green”, when we feel calm and ready to learn. At Allen Brook, we use the following language (in case your child uses it at home to help explain situations):  

If you are “on the green”, you are ready to learn.  You are calm and happy/content.

If you are “on the yellow”, you are starting to get frustrated/angry/annoyed, but you are still in control of your open feelings.  You are encouraged to try some of the mindfulness strategies we have learned, such as deep breathing, calm coloring, yoga, a quick break, etc.

If you are “on the red”, you are very angry.  You are not in control of your feelings now and need help.

If you are “on the blue”, you are feeling tired or sad.

• Ms. Clark also taught us some yoga this week.  We learned the Tree Pose, the Rainbow Breathing and the Eagle Pose.  Thank you Ms. Clark!

• The students filled the classroom buzzy jar again for being safe, kind and responsible.  This time we celebrated with extra play time outside in the snow.  It was fun!.  

Reading:

• The students worked on building their reading stamina in class this week.  They received multiple new “just right” books for their book bins and were encouraged to show perseverance and a growth mindset when reading independently or with a teacher.  What a fantastic group of readers we have!

• We also focused on the different reading strategies we can use during independent times.  Here is a visual of some of the ones we use in class.

• The students all received a new reading bookmark.  It has a little highlighted window in its center to help the students stay on track and pay close attention to the text/letters.

Writing:

• We continued writing our opinion pieces this week.  This week, the students shared their opinions about their favorite food.  They also continued to practice more independence applying age-appropriate grammar, such as finger-spacing between words, proper letter formation, and ending punctuation.

• The students learned about bonus letters this week.  They learned to write these words as well as how to mark them up and tap them out.

• The students reviewed digraphs and trick words too. 

First Grade Math:

• We filled our math classroom buzzy jar for being safe, kind and responsible in math class!  The students chose to play familiar math games with each other.  We also played a new game called “Number Sparkle”.  This game was invented by a student in our class!  It was so fun.  Ask your child to explain (Hint: It helped us pay close attention to each symbol in an equation).

• We revisited the importance of having a “Growth Mindset” in math (as in all classes!).  We discussed what it looks like and sounds like to persevere in math, have a positive mindset and not give up, even when the math problems get harder.

• 

• First grade mathematicians continued working on solving problems with missing addends and subtrahends this week.  They were encouraged to use a variety of strategies to solve their calculations to make sure they had arrived at the correct answer.  They used rekenreks, magnetic 20-frames and a strategy called “counting on”.  The equations we worked on this week were written is different ways to, inviting the students to carefully pay attention to the symbols and their respective order in the sequence.  For example, we worked on equations that looked like this:

8=5+___

9-____=6

  ____-2=4

• First grade mathematicians also played several games practicing skills and strategies for adding 10 to a number.

• First grade mathematicians also started exploring “Off-Decade Counting”.  They are learning how to add 10 to any number, starting at a more unfamiliar number such as 3, or 4 (3, 13, 23, 33, etc)

Science:

• This week, the students participated in a series of lessons learning how light, sound and colors can be used to communicate.  We will continue these concepts in the next few weeks too.

• The students also worked on our new science mural in our classroom.  Together, we chart what we think we know, what we learn, what our scientific evidence is, any questions or wonderings we have and lastly how we can use scientific explanations for this new knowledge.  Some students have already added new pictures to this wall to add more details.  Thank you!

News and Reminders:

• Our school is changing the dismissal protocols starting next week.   Our school now asks that parents pick up their children by 2:50.   We understand that traffic can sometimes back up and parents arrive late for a variety of different reasons.   If that is the case, your child will wait inside the building for your arrival.  Buses and Part 2 students will have the same dismissal procedures and nothing will change for them. 

• Here is a reminder for birthday celebrations:  On Harmony, we do not celebrate your child’s birthday with food/candy due to covid and dietary restrictions.  Instead, we do our best to make your child’s birthday special by singing to him/her, hand out a birthday balloon and a special birthday covering on your child’s chair.  The birthday child also gets to choose a small birthday surprise from the classroom Treasure Box and go down to see Ms. Filion for a special birthday surprise.  If your child wants to bring in a special book for a read aloud, or show/share something special on that day, he/she can do that too.  Thank you for understanding.

• We will celebrate Valentine’s Day on Harmony on 2/14.  If your child wishes to share Valentine’s Day cards with his/her friends, please make sure all children in our class is included.  No food or candy, please. Please bring in these cards on Monday.  The students will hand them out to each other on Monday.  They will also create a special Valentine’s Day envelope/bag for all of these cards for storage. Your child has a class-list inside his/her Home Folder today.  Thank you. 

• On Friday, February 4th we will be celebrating the 100th Day of School! Students are invited to bring in a collection of 100 to share at our Math Museum that day. Counting collections gives mathematicians opportunities to practice counting forward and backward fluently, and to organize large quantities into efficient groups. Collections should fit in a large Ziploc bag (examples: cheerios, raw pasta/beans, beads, paperclips, etc.). Students are welcome to organize a collection with items from the classroom if they choose not to bring something from home!

Have a great weekend,

Maria

Pictures from our week together

 

Learning about light and shadows using flashlights:

Learning about place value using math tools and games:

Read alouds together:

Creating decade strips in math to build our understanding of place value:

Family Newsletter

 Dear Families,

Here is our week in review:

Social-Emotional Learning:

• The students filled the buzzy jar again for being safe, kind and responsible.  This time, we celebrated with stuffy day.   The students had so much fun learning and playing along with their stuffed animals!  

• This week, we read books, magazines and talked about Martin Luther King Jr.  We  explored how his ideas of a “beloved community”, peace and inclusion can be shown and practiced in our own classroom.  We noticed that our current focus on empathy, kindness and compassion are also ideas that people embraced long ago. 

• This week, we discussed and practiced the difference between being “fun silly” and ``rude silly”.  We recognized that when we are silly during learning times, other students cannot focus as well and learn.  We practiced the times when we can be silly.  We can be louder and sillier during morning explore times, play-times and recess.  

Reading:

• This week, the students continued practicing their visualization skills and strategies for reading more independently.  Each student received a reading bookmark with all the strategies we have learned so far this year to help them develop more independence and perseverance when encountering a challenging or unfamiliar word.  They are encouraged to use this bookmark as a visual reminder of what they can do themselves (it also helps them keep track of where they left off !).

• We had another library exchange.  Please remember to pack your child’s library books on Tuesdays so your child can exchange them for new ones.  Thank you.

• Reading assessments will continue this month as well.  We use the Fountas & Pinnell Reading Assessment, which assesses reading accuracy, comprehension and fluency.  We also assess phonics and trick words.  It is so great to see the children’s growth in literacy as well as their blossoming love of learning in general.  What a terrific group of kids!

• Some students brought home index cards with trick words written on them this week.  These are “old” trick words they have used and practiced during reading times.  Next week, we will add new trick words based upon new needs.

Writing:

• The students wrote their own “I have a dream” statements this week, following some read alouds and learning about Martin Luther King Jr.  They wrote about their dreams for the world and how to make the world a better place for everyone.  The students had fantastic ideas and wrote about their dreams for people to get along, clean up trash and include others in play.

First Grade Math:

• First grade mathematicians learned about groups of tens and some more in several new math stations and games.  They used rekenreks, 10 and 20 frames as well as popsicle sticks to show their understanding of tens and ones.  They also learned about the importance of writing these numbers from the left to the right, ie showing the groups of tens first and then the ones to prevent digit reversals.

• First grade mathematicians also participated in our district-wide PNOA math assessment.  Thank you Caitlin Bianchi for helping us out while we are doing these.  

Science:

• First grade scientists continued exploring light and sound this week.  They started creating shadow puppets which will be used to illustrate some of the properties of light as you move a light source in front of them.  Their shadow puppets are packed inside their backpacks today, so please look for those.  Perhaps your scientist will even share some of the experiments we did and share what we learned?

• We also learned about transparent, translucent and opaque objects this week.  We learned along with Mystery Doug and ended the exploration by sorting various materials into different groups based upon these criteria.  

• First grade scientists also learned how to listen attentively to new information and take notes as a scientist.  They listened to several read alouds on the topic  and worked with a partner to jot down, or draw, interesting facts they learned.  This work will continue and we will slowly shift over to more non-fiction books and nonfiction text features as part of our reader’s workshop and writer's workshops as well.  Stay tuned!

News and Reminders:

• Our school is changing the dismissal protocols starting next week.   Our school now asks that parents pick up their children by 2:50.   We understand that traffic can sometimes back up and parents arrive late for a variety of different reasons.   If that is the case, your child will wait inside the building for your arrival.  Buses and Part 2 students will have the same dismissal procedures and nothing will change for them. 

• Here is the link to this week's Bell.

Have a great weekend,

Maria

Pictures from our week together

 Sharing our math thinking:

Classroom Buzzy Celebration: Extra play time!

Learning about sound:

Partner Reading:

Family Newsletter

 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