Wow! This week has just flown by! What a great first week we have had. We have been every busy doing all sorts of learning.
Reading
In first grade we are learning all about being good readers and we have learned two very important things that good readers do: 1) Good readers read every day, and 2) Good readers think about what they are reading. We have read a book every morning and written in our Reader's Response Journals about the thoughts we have had about these books. We have also enjoyed listening to books. Even though we are listening, we are still thinking about the stories we hear and are making connections to our literature.
Social Studies
In first grade we are good citizens. We have talked all week about how we are going to be good citizens in our community and at our school. We also talked about how we are a team...Tiger Team. We must work together to always set a good example and help out our teammates if they need us. We are working together as a team every day. If one of us is not being a good citizen, that affects all of us in our Tiger Team classroom. We want to come to a safe, fun, and friendly classroom everyday. We learned about our rules and how they keep us safe so we can learn. Rules also help us remember to be kind. Ask me about Mr. Crumbles and how our hurtful words crumbled him all up. Even when we apologized, we could not smooth away the wrinkles to make him go back the way he was. We signed Mr. Crumbles to pledge that we would think about our words and our actions so as not to crumble other people's hearts.
In first grade we are going to be mathematicians. We work on graphing every day. We can graph a lot of different information like the weather, the temperature outside, how we get home from school, and even our eye color! We learned about the parts of a graph and we created graphs as a class and by ourselves by interviewing each other. We made a real-object graph from our goldfish snack, we made a bar graph, and we even made a picture graph. We learned about the words "most" and "least" and how if something is the same, it is "equal." We even learned the math word "sort." Ask me what it means!
Science
In first grade we are going to be scientists and we will be visiting our science laboratory a lot this year. We talked about what we think a scientist does and then we did some research by reading a few books to discover what we were right about and what some of our misconceptions were. We learned new information as well. We talked about how a scientist's job is to think and ask questions. However, the most important thing a scientist does is to be safe. We talked about the 5 rules of our science laboratory and how we are going to be safe scientists. We each signed a safety contract to pledge this. Remember signing it with me? We decorated our science notebooks with pictures of us being real scientists. On Friday, we even visited the science laboratory to check out the tools we will be using. We wrote about 1 tool we discovered and what it can be used for.
We can't wait for next week. We will be talking more about what good readers do and we will be practicing our daily Reading Roundup jobs. These daily jobs helps us become better readers by reading independently from books we choose from our classroom library, reading with a buddy so we can learn from each other, listening to reading while we are thinking and making connections, working with words to identify patterns and sounds in our books, and writing to share stories and memories. We will be talking about special good citizens call leaders. Did you know we have leaders if our school? We will be learning about telling time to the hour and half-hour. We will also be studying soil and that means another trip to the science laboratory.
Remember, our first homework will go home on Tuesday in my blue Daily Folder and is due the following Tuesday since we don't have school on Monday. Our first spelling test is on Friday.
Love,
