Our four classmates rocked it at Community Meeting with their stories “When it gets cold outside...”. Congratulations to our four presenters - - we are so proud of you!
This week with our Wonders program we will focus on the Essential Question of: How do we get our food? We will be reading about where some of our favorite foods come from…chocolate…honey…sugar. Yum! Shelley Rotner and Gary Goss share pictures and facts about these foods in their book, Where does food come from? Our phonics focus is the long vowel sound of Uu, which is spelled: “oo”. Our spelling words are: book, look, cook, took, hood, wood Sight Words: buy, done (with exposure to these additional words: after, every, soon, work) We will be reviewing contractions with “not” and learning about “inflectional endings”. Why do we double the consonant when we add –ed and -ing to words? We will continue practicing our Opinion Writing. Last week we were divided on which was a better part of the playground - - Big Toy or Fairy Village. We will finish this writing up and practice with another opinion piece: Should First Graders have homework every night? I can’t wait to hear their reasoning on this one! We have finished up Unit 5 in our Everyday Mathematics program. Wow – your children are amazing with their understanding of place value and expanded notation. We will learn about the hour hand this week. Did your child share their knowledge of the Big Dipper with you? We will continue our study of The Spinning Sky this week as we look at the North Star and answer the question of: How can stars help you if you get lost? Next time you are in school, swing by and check out our bulletin board. Your child’s beautiful picture of the night sky is hanging up. Will the groundhog see its shadow? We will explore this question on Friday. We are ready for spring - - how about you?
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This week in our Wonders program we will focus on the Essential Question: How is life different than it was long ago? We can’t wait to hear what your children think “long ago” means. How are schools different? Transportation? Food? We will be reading Gordon Titcomb’s book The Last Train. This book is based on a song by Mr. Titcomb. Wendell Minor’s illustrations help to make this a wonderful book.
Our phonics focus will be Long Vowel Oo and Long Vowel Uu, with the following spelling words: hope, nose, note, rope, cute, cub Sight Words: ago, people We have been doing a lot of writing in class with a focus on generating ideas, organization our ideas so they have a beginning, a middle, an ending, and adding wonderful words to help describe our writing and make it more exciting. This week we will learn about a new type of writing: Opinion Writing. We will be learning how to state our opinion about something and back up our writing up with two reasons that support the opinion statement. Reading homework will go home on Tuesday...last week was so crazy with the holiday and a snow day thrown into the mix. With our Everyday Mathematics program we will continue working on our Number Sense, balancing equations, place value (a favorite activity), and measurement. In Science we will continue our investigation with the Spinning Sky by focusing on the following questions: Why do you have to go to bed early in the summer? Why do the stars come out a night? Be on the lookout for an email from Sarah Pearl about our Friendship Celebration in February. More information to be sent home this week. Just a reminder…as per the SAU…all volunteers (whether in the classroom or on field trips) must watch the Bullying Video and be fingerprinted. I have copied the weekly notification from the “Thursday Notice” below:
Volunteers/Designated Volunteers: All volunteers need to watch the Bullying Video on the SAU #19 website under Special Projects / Anti-Bullying Project. In addition you will need to sign the Verification of Bullying Training Form also found on the website. SAU 19 will host fingerprinting opportunities for Designated Volunteers throughout the school year on the first Wednesday of each month from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm. For more information please visit the school website. The words are:
made, take, same, like, fine, pine, Sight Words: was, so Sorry for the confusion! Our holiday celebration was a blast. Thank you for the wonderful treats that were sent in as well as the parent volunteers who assisted. Just before Winter break we did a project that involved Santa getting stuck in a chimney. Our activity during our celebration was to create a chimney that Santa could fit down. We saw so many successful chimneys that were creative and clever. When presented with the challenge of “a very fat Santa”, your children were able to still design the perfect chimney for him to fit down. Such a great activity! Did your children tell you about our investigation with shadows? Using their knowledge of the sun and the path that it takes across the sky, they were able to move a light source (a flashlight) to change the shape and length of the shadow on an object. We followed up the next day looking at the patterns in the sun’s movement across the sky. We found out that the height of the sun in the sky affects a shadow’s length and direction. Finally, we created a Sun Finder which showed the sun’s movement across the sky. See the pictures below. “I have a dream...” Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a man filled with hopes for all people. He believed that you could peacefully work for equal and fair treatment for all Americans. He dreamed of a day when people would not be judged by the color of their skins but by the content of their character. We talked extensively last Friday about Dr. King, one of America’s greatest leaders. Getting together with our Reading Buddies, we listened to James Taylor’s song Shed A Little Light – a song honoring Dr. King. We created Peace Doves and put them up around our Reading Buddy Tree. This week with our Wonders program we will be talking and reading about folktales. We will connect one of our Wonders’ stories, The Red Mitten, to Jan Brett’s wonderful story, The Mitten. We will also read another one of Jan Brett’s folktales, The Gingerbread Baby. The phonics focus will be difficult. Soft “c” and “g” as well as “dge” will be introduced. The spelling words for the week will not have any of these spelling patterns. Instead, we will practice them in the classroom all week. The spelling patterns this week will continue with Long Vowel A and Long Vowel I. made, take, same, like, fin, pin Sight Words: was, so With our Everyday Mathematics program we will continue to work on greater than, less than, and equal. Last week we did an activity using Virginia Kroll’s book, Equal Schmequal. In this story we read about Mouse and her friends and their quest to make the teams for a tug-of-war equal. But what does it mean to be equal? We soon discovered that a number sentence can have many numbers on both sides of the equal sign - - but, each side must have the same (or equal) amount (answer). In addition to place value, <, >, =, and coins we will work some more with doubles and doubles plus one. Using Lily Toy Hong’s book, Two of Everything, we will work with double numbers. Why does adding double numbers together always come out with an answer that is even? We will continue our discovery of even numbers as we do an activity with goldfish crackers near the end of the week. Friday morning we will have our Holiday Brunch. We will be doing a STEM problem based our pre-holiday activities with Santa being stuck in your chimney. This week with our Wonders program we will focus on the Essential Question: How do plants change as they grow? Interesting question with snow on the ground and below freezing temperatures outside!! We will be reading several books about plants and how plants grow. Our phonics focus will be Long Vowel Ii, with the spelling pattern of i_e. I sent home a letter last Friday (bright pink paper) explaining the spelling change for this week. The words are getting more difficult with the introduction of long vowels. All of the time away from the classroom (due to snow days and delayed openings) has meant that we have not had as many review opportunities during the course of the week. This week’s spelling words will contain three long vowel Aa words and three long vowel Ii words: made, game, late ride, bike, mine We will be reviewing all of the long vowel words that our Wonders program has suggested, but your child will only be held responsible for the above words. Beginning on Tuesday night, your child will be taking home their Reading Group book to share with you. Be on the lookout for a note in your child’s folder on Tuesday explaining the homework. In Science we will investigate shadows, focusing on these three questions: Could a statue’s shadow move? What does your shadow do when you’re not looking? How can the sun help you if you are lost? Your children are amazing with understanding place value. We have been doing lots of activities in the classroom and, wow, has it paid off. Not only can your children solve an equation when presented with Longs and Cubes/Units (place value manipulatives) they are beginning to break a number down into Expanded Notation. What does this look like? The number 56 has five Longs and six Cubes. It also means: 50 + 6. Why is this important? This week we will apply this place value knowledge to the understanding of coins and their values. A Long and a Dime are the same, a Cube and a Penny are the same. Your children will be building numbers to represent coin amounts. In Social Studies we will learn about Martin Luther King, Jr., culminating our study with our Reading Buddies on Friday. If we have school tomorrow....we will not be having a spelling test. Enjoy the snow - stay safe.
Be on the lookout for an email from Sarah Pearl about our brunch...it has been rescheduled to Friday January 12th at 8:30.
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