Dear Family,
This week was the start of September and we are already on our way to our every day first grade routine. We learned a lot of new things this week, especially about working independently. Because Mrs. Maggart will be working with us in small groups so we are getting the attention and content we each need, we have been practicing how we will be working independently during our Reading Round-up and Math Workshop time. Here are some of the expectations that we use to help make this learning time a successful and fulfilling time:
This week, we started our Word Studies. Each week, we will study a different spelling pattern. We will study the sounds and the patterns and work on building words using these sounds and patterns. Mrs. Maggart had us do a beginning consonant sort together this week since it was our first time. Soon, I will be getting a word sort that suits me best and has patterns that I need to study. We worked on cutting out the pictures and letters, sorting them, and then gluing them into our Word Study Notebook for us to use all week.
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| Every Monday, Word Study is on our Daily Agenda. |
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| What my Word Study Notebook looks like. |
Mrs. Maggart also displays her word sort for the week so we can use it if we need to.
We use the words in our Word Study Notebook during Reading Round-up, which is our Reading Workshop.
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| We use letter beads to "Lace a Word." |
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| We use magnets to make our words. |
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| We go on "Word Hunts" and look for words with these spelling patterns in our reading books. We record them on poster paper and hang them around our classroom so we can see all of the patterns we have studied. |
We work on activities like responding to reading, listening to different genres of stories, and reading independently.
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| Our Reading Round-up rotations by table groups. Soon, we will have 5 rotations to complete a day! |
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| We complete a response to our reading after we finish a good book. |
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| Listening to different stories on our Walkman Readers. We go through lots of batteries! |
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| Reading for pleasure at our Book Nook. |
We also pick out our own reading books that we use for all of our Reading Round-up activities from our Tiger Team Library. We are so lucky that our parents order books from our Scholastic book orders so Mrs. Maggart is able to get free books and add to our classroom Tiger Team Library. We have so many choices.
We have to be sure that when we are picking out books from our Tiger Team Library, we are choosing books that are just right for us. We celebrate how we are all different learners in our class - we read differently, spell differently, and even do math differently. That is why our library is so special. There are chapter books for those of us who are ready for those and so many great picture books that are just right for me!
We talked about how picking out a book is just like picking out a pair of shoes. We need to make sure that if we're going to play on the playground, we have the appropriate shoes on otherwise we would feel really uncomfortable. That's the same thing with a book that is not appropriate for us - we would feel very uncomfortable reading it and we wouldn't be able to complete all of our Reading Round-up activities with a book that we did not find interesting, a book we did not comprehend, or a book where we didn't know most of the words.
When we are reading, it is important to practice good "thumbs up" independent reading. We discussed what this would look like and we made this chart to remind us what is "thumbs up" and what is "thumbs down" reading behavior,
For Writer's Workshop, we will always start off with a meeting on the rug. When we meet, we have a mini-lesson about what good writer's do. This week, we talked about how writer's first think ... they think of a great topic. Mrs. Maggart said she loved rainbows but she couldn't think of a time when she did anything with rainbows so we decided that wasn't a good topic. She also loves her cat, Harley. Mrs. Maggart could think of a great time she had with Harley and the time he ate all of her queso cheese. She wrote about that.
We also talked about what we do when we think we're finished with a piece in our Writer's Notebook. We can add more to our picture or add more to our words. When we have done these things, we are able to start a new piece.
There are so many writing tools that we can use. We talked about each of them, explored them, and even practiced using them. They will help us when we need to spell words, sound out words, and write my first grade words.
Here we are working hard on our writing after our meeting.
In Math, we began studying time. We compared digital and analog clocks and explored both of them. We created our own analog clocks so we could practice making time to the hour and the half-hour.
We some really great books for mathematicians about time. Here are a few:
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| This book helped us learn about how time changes and how it takes time to get to places. |
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| This book helped us learn about all the different ways we can measure time, like hours, minutes, years, months, etc. |
During Math Workshop, Mrs. Maggart will meet with us in small groups so we can study with her what we are struggling with. During this time, Mrs. Maggart has put some really cool math games into a bucket for our table groups to choose from. This week, we learned three great time-telling games. We learned a memory game where we match hour digital clocks to hour analog clocks and we learned the half-hour version too. We also learned a duration "bingo" game.
Every day in math, we always have our math calendar. During this time, we use the tens and ones blocks to build how many days we have been in school, decide if that number is odd or even, graph our weather and our temperature for the day and practice other math skills. We skip-count every day. Today, we skip-counted by odd numbers. We also practice our fact families. We know that there are 3 numbers in our family and they can make 2 addition sentences and 2 subtraction or take away sentences. Mrs. Maggart challenges us by flipping over the number cards and we have to think about which number is missing from each sentence. We also practice our math words each week. We read them and talk about what they mean. Even after we study time, all of our math words will be put on our Word Wall where we can look for them whenever we need them!
We are also working on problem solving. This week we got to explore with our math tools. There are so many different tools that we can use as a second strategy when we are solving our daily word problem. We also learned the expectations for when we are solving word problems. It's a good thing we have to use 2 strategies ... this means I get to double-check my work!
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| Working hard on my "Question of the Day" problem solving. |
In Science, we made a KWL chart about what we know and wonder about science and scientists. We read a great book about what scientists do:
We also learned about some different scientists and what they study. We synergized at our table groups and made a scientist from our chart, dressing him/her in the appropriate clothes for their line of study, giving them the right tools, and then making a great background of the area(s) they work in. We are not done with our posters yet, but they are looking great!
Of course we talked about leaders in Social Studies this week as well. We learned about some important leaders of our community, our state, and our nation. Each week, we will study a "Leader of the Week" whose leadership had a significant impact on our world. Next week, we will be studying Benjamin Franklin.
We also want to say a big THANK YOU to Mrs. Jones for donating some items from our class wish list! This has been a very busy and very fun week! Next week is a 4-day week since we do not have school on Monday. See you then!
Love,
