Astronaunts, Meterologists, Geologists, Oh My!

Dear Family,

We started off our week by looking at our goals in each subject. Mrs. Maggart always writes these on the front board. Next week, we will be setting goals for ourselves for each subject.

We always get started with our day with some morning work to get our brains going, like our Number of the Day. We are learning how to draw a number using tens and ones blocks, write it using tally marks, as well as determining whether our number is odd or even.

Each day, we start off with our Word Study time where we practice our spelling words focusing on different spelling patterns. We are learning the procedures by working on beginning letter sounds. One of the activities we get to do is called a Speed Sort. We race against fun timers and see how many times we can sort our words before time runs out!

In Writer's Workshop this week, we talked about the different things that we could write about each day. We read a really good story about a girl who wanted to write the perfect story, but in the end, she knew that she should write a story from her heart or what she knew best.

We created "Heart Maps" of all of the things that make up who we are and could serve as topics for our writing. We decorated the front of our Draft Books with our "Heart Maps" and even added a ribbon for a bookmark. Now we are all ready to write!

This is where we store our Draft Books and we will learn how each bucket represents a step in the writing process.

We learned about how to make a picture plan in our Draft Books when we have chosen a topic. This is like our "brainstorming." We learned about how we can label our pictures and how this helps readers know what our picture is.

In Reader's Round-up, we have already been practicing reading-to-self and picking out books to read from our class Tiger Team Library. This week, we learned about how we can respond to our reading by writing about our "book thoughts," making a story map, comparing stories and characters using Venn diagrams, and writing about favorite parts. We also got to try listening-to-reading. We have lots of choices on our CD players to listen with friends or we can listen by ourselves on the disc men. That is why Mrs. Maggart is always in need of AA batteries because we get to listen to reading every day!

This is how we determine what activities we are doing for the day.

We have lots of choices for different responses we can complete.

Mrs. Maggart has also been having us read our first grade sight words. We each have a booklet and our goal is to be able to fluently read all 100 words by the end of the school year!

In Math, we have been continuing to work with our tools to build and represent numbers as well as comparing numbers. We learned Math Words to describe numbers. We learned a fun game where we had to use our new math words to describe two numbers.

Some of our Math Words

We also learned about making different combinations of ten. We learned a fun new buddy game called Total Ten.

We are still practicing using tens and ones blocks to build numbers. We had a buddy choose a number on our 100's chart and we practiced building a number that was less than, equal to, and greater than that number.

After we finish our Math Workshop, we get to pull out our Math Buckets and work independently on different activies to help us improve our math skills.

We match pictures of tens and ones blocks to their numerical value

We read books for mathematicians and write a response to them

We practice our counting of various objects.

We play with our buddies to roll numbers and identify sums.

We use math manipulatives

We work with numbers and represent them using number sentences, ten frames, tally marks, and written clues.

In Science, we learned about different kinds of scientists and what they study. We read a really cool book about zoologists and learned a lot of new facts.



We worked with our groups to make a poster of a scientist, dressing him/her in the correct outfit, drawing their needed gear, and making sure to draw a detailed background to represent where each scientist studies. Then, we presented our posters to the class.

Our finished scientists posters

Finally, we decided what type of scientist we would like to be and we designed ourselves as this scientist. We glued this onto the first page in our Science Notebooks.

We love Wednesdays and getting to use the laptops during Science. Laptops are a tool that scientists can use to learn more information. This week, we played a game called "Sid the Kid" and we had to identify the names of scientists and what tools they each need in order to work in their fields.

Two heads are better than one!

We are off for another weekend and then back to school Monday for some more fun and learning!

Love,

 

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,