Its beginning to look a lot like autumn!

Dear Mom & Dad,

What a fun week we had this week! We had so many special visitors in our classroom and they had nothing but great things to say about how hard we are working in our room. Mrs. Connelly, our Assistant Principal, came to.visit us one morning during our Reading Roundup time. She said she couldn't believe we were first graders. She complimented us on how engaged we were in our reading activities. Afterall, the only way to become a better reader is to read every day! Brian's grandmother came in to visit as well. She was so helpful and I really liked how she helped me if I had a question. She even sat and read with a few of our Tiger Team members. We hope she can visit again!

Mrs. Maggart has been reading with us in our groups. Its fun to be in a group of readers who like the same books as I do. We are learning about reading strategies to help me on those hard parts. Mrs. Maggart even let's us take home the book we read together. Its okay if you can't sit and read it with me because I have already read that book 3 or 4 times so I should be able to read it all by myself.

Every morning Mrs. Maggart read us a story about a different character. We got to create our own characters and we made character trading cards. We are using our cards to write a story about our character. Ask me what character I created!

In social studies, we are learning about maps. We explored with magnifying glasses different types of maps and even looked at globes. We helped our friend Bob find his way around by using a compass rose and a map key. We even made our own compass roses. Mrs. Maggart says we are going to need them for something next week. Hmm. What could we be doing? :-)



Designing our compass rose in our Social Studies notebook



Almost done...just need to label North, East, South, and West.

Exploring maps and globes

You should be so proud of me! I am becoming such a great mathematician. We are building numbers with tens and ones, making 10 in different ways, and practicing my skip counting everyday. We just love math!

Playing math games on our laptops.

Practicing our skip counting with games.

Working hard on our daily problem solving.

Anyone want to play a math card game?

Which dice is more?

Wow Mrs. Maggart! She won again!

In science we learned all about where we can find water. I learned about streams, rivers, lakes, and the ocean. There is fresh water and salt water. We did a science experiment to see if an egg would float in salt water and if it would float in fresh water. Ask me what happened! Mrs. Maggart said our jobs as scientists is to ask an adult what a natural resource is. We are starting a whole new lesson on Monday.

Next week we will be talking about college and different things I can be when I grow up. We will get to visit with a guest who will tell us all about his job working with NASA. We took our picture for our college bond pendant and its hanging in the hallway. See if you can find it! Tiger Team is college bound!

Let's have a great weekend!

Love,

Reading and Writing and Math...Oh My!

Dear Mom & Dad,

We had a super busy week this week in first grade. Man, are we working hard! We are now ready to start our Reading Roundup hour by ourselves. This means I am responsible for completing 3 reading activities independently each day. I am reading independently, reading with a buddy, listening to reading on the laptops or on the Walkmans or Listening Post, and writing about my reading as well. I even get to visit our Tiger Team library to choose new books for my book bag and  there's even a time when I get to kick off my shoes and relax to read. I will even be making words from some of my favorite stories, looking for words with word patterns like my weekly spelling words. By being a good reader and completing my daily Reading Roundup tasks, I will be on my way to becoming a more successful reader, which is my goal for this first grade year!

Our daliy Reading Roundup activities assigned to our table

Listening to reading on Book Flix

Listening Post

Reading in the Book Nook filled with books Mrs. Maggart has shared with us

Ten Toes Reading



Walkman Readers



Buddy Reading

In math, we are continuing to do daily problem solving with our question of the day. This week, we worked on "Buddy Checking." When I finish my Question of the Day, I find my buddy and show them the 2 strategies I used to solve the problem, my answer, my number sentence, and my justification. My buddy will let me know if I followed all of the expectations or if I need to go back and check my work.

Mrs. Fleming our counselor came to visit us this week. Ask me about the cool "magic" trick she did and how we are all connected!

In science, we talked about all of the different ways that we use water. Look at our science wall! It's filling up with so many vocabulary words after us learning about soil and next week we'll be learning about all of the different places water can be found.

In Social Studies, we learned about 3 famous good citizens:

We wrote about them in our Good Citizenship books. Ask me what I learned about them and how I am going to be a good citizen so one day maybe Mrs. Maggart will teach about me to her students and the great deeds that I did!

We have so many fun things planned for next week and Mrs. Maggart bought a lot of new books for us to learn about characters.

Love,

Happy Grandparents' Day!

Dear Mom & Dad,

Today was our Grandparents' Day luncheon. What an exciting, great day! Tiger Team was so excited to have our grandparents and parents visit our school and see us as 1st graders. Thank you for being so patient with so many people in our cafeteria and for making this day so great! Thank you for also walking me back to my classroom to see all of the exciting things in our room.

So far we have been talking about being a good, independent reader. This week, we have been talking about being great writers. We have been going through the writing process of what a good writer does to get started on a new piece.

We made a list of ideas we could write about whenever we get "stuck" and we copied this list onto a fun "BINGO" writing sheet to glue inside the covers of our draft books. Now I will always be able to think of something to write about. Mrs. Maggart says a great place to get ideas for our writing is from books we read. Mrs. Maggart reads us a story every morning and this week we read a silly story about being late to school, a story about a teacher that was a dragon, and a story about a frog and a toad who could talk and liked to tell each other spooky stories. We could write stories like these too!

We added "our frogs" to our list of things we could write about. But we needed to name our frogs first! We each made a list of 3 names we would like. Then we shared our lists and made a giant list of our favorite names. We voted on the top three. And our frogs' new names? We have Coco, Thunder, and Lily.

This week we talked about families and what makes our families so special to us. We read a lot of great books about families. We even made our family trees!

We finished our soil study this week. Thank you to Madi for bringing in two different types of soil for us to observe like scientists. We discovered things we were right about, things that were a misconception, and even a lot of new information about soil. Wow! Being a scientist is fun!

Now for a great weekend and then back to school on Monday!

Love,

New Friends...

Dear Mom & Dad,

We have been talking a lot this week about being good citizens and about leaders. Did you know I can be a leader too? There are even leaders of our school that I can go to. Ask me who they are!

Our leader mobile

We have been talking about communities and how we are a classroom community and we're called Tiger Team. We want to be good teammates and always help each other. Our Tiger Team classroom is a safe place for us to come and learn ... and learn in our unique special ways. We're all different and we always respect those differences. we even acted out some scenarios where we can be good citizens or make a choice that would make others have a sad face.

What is this one?

We started doing math stations this week! Mrs. Maggart has an activity for each table to do while she works with us one-on-one or in small groups so she can work with me on what I need because what I need may be different than what my friend needs. We are responsible for finishing our work all by ourselves! We are figuring out skip-counting patterns, making numbers in as many ways as I can, reading math books and writing about what I learned, playing math games on the laptops, and even playing games about time. And guess what? Each thing I do is just for me! My friend may be working with a different number than me but that's okay 'cause we're all different and we celebrate that!

Next week Mrs. Maggart is going to read with me one-on-one to see where I am and what books would be best for me. While she is doing this with our Tiger Team, I will be getting to do Reading Round-up which is a lot of activities where I will be reading my books from our Tiger Team library and making words, writing about them, and even listening to different books on Walkmans and the laptops. Again, I am responsible for me and doing my work all by myself. I may make some mistakes on my spelling or punctuation but that's okay because I'm trying my best and doing it all by myself.

What independent reading should look like - thumbs up!

We have 3 new friends to add to our Tiger Team classroom. We just got 3 fire bellied toads. They are so little! We take turns watering the tank when Mrs. Maggart sees us working hard. We have to keep their tank nice and wet. We are so excited to learn all about them and how to take care of them. Next week we will get to feed them! We also need to name them. What good names did I think of?

There is not any school on Monday so we will see everyone back on Tuesday!

Love,