A Short Week

Dear Family,

This week was only a 4-day week because of the Labor Day holiday weekend. We were so excited to return to school on Tuesday and begin to dive into the beginning of our first grade curriculum.

Each morning, we start our day with our Word Study where we focus on spelling in a unique and fun way. Last week, we learned the names of our classmates and sorted them on our Word Wall, a tool we use to spell familiar words.

This week, we began to learn the procedures we will follow with all of our word sorts. We cut out our word sort (focusing on beginning letter sounds just to get started) and did some fun activities with these words throughout the week. We did a Speed Sort where we raced against the clock to sort the words into the correct beginning letter categories. We will go on a Word Hunt where we will look for words with the same spelling pattern in our books and throughout the room. We also learned about how we will glue and keep these sorts in our Word Study Notebooks and how we will be practicing the spelling of these words when we do "Word Work" during Reading Round-up.

We were introduced to Reading Round-up this week and we focused on reading to ourselves and responding to our reading with different responses.

We discussed how we are building our stamina when it comes to reading and what that means.

Did you know that there are 3 ways that I can be reading my books? We talked and practiced each way as we worked on our stamina!

We got to choose books from our class Tiger Team library and learned about how we will store these books in our individual book baskets.

So many choices in our library!

This is where we store our book baskets.

In our book baskets, we also have our very own Reader's Response Journal where we keep all of our responses that we complete after we read our books.

 We completed a story map in our journals as well as a character trait response based on the story we read last week, The Recess Queen.

 In Math, we worked more on place value and counting our tens and ones blocks. We also learned about the words "greater than" and "less than." We discussed how we can compare quantities as well. We learned a fun new game where we played with a buddy, flipped over one card each, counted the quantity on our card, and the person with the greatest quantity got to take both cards! We had so much fun!

 We also were introduced to the "Question of the Day," or our daily problem solving. We learned about the requirements for our problem solving and solved a few problems all together with Mrs. Maggart.

We are continuing to study numbers and all of the forms that we can represent them. Here is a fun WANTED activity that we do independently. We helped Mrs. Maggart complete her WANTED poster for the number eight.

Reading is not just for Reading Round-up time. We read a great book for mathematicians:



Then we played the tally game and use craft sticks and a fun chant to learn how to represent numbers with tally marks.

In Science, we discussed what a scientist is and what we think scientist do, need, have, and are. We read these two great books about scientists:





Then we helped Mrs. Maggart complete this large chart for our Science bulletin board. We can't forget how important it is to know our vocabulary words.

Then, we created our own charts to keep in our Science Notebooks. However, it wouldn't be complete without our very own scientists!

This weekend is Grandparents' Day so in Social Studies we read a very fun book about spending time with our grandparent:



Then, to show our love and appreciation for our grandparents, we created something a little special for them. We did it all by ourselves and were so excited to frame it as well. Some of us were even able to present it to our grandparents at the Grandparents' Luncheon on Friday!

This week our fundraiser started as well and will continue for a few more weeks. For each magazine subscription I sell, I earn one of these really cool frogs.

AND I also qualify for the Frog of the Day prize. If my frog is announced on the morning announcements, I win a really cool prize! How fun!

Love,