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,

First Week of First Grade

Dear Family,

What a great first week of first grade! Boy, it was a long 5-day week because we had SO much to do and had such a blast doing it. We were so exhausted by 2:45 on Friday afternoon and we have a 3-day weekend to rest up for another fabulous week with our Tiger Team.

We have done lots of activities and projects this week to learn more about each other and about rules and procedures for our first grade classroom.

We started off our very first day reading one of Mrs. Maggart's favorite books:



We talked about how we were all feeling differently and that was okay...soon our jitters would go away too!

We made a graph to see how other people were feeling in our classroom.

Look! There were other people feeling just like I was!

 We talked about how we were all different and our TIger Team celebrated being unique and different. We read a book about how fun our differences can be.



Then, we followed the directions on our Direction Board.

We are hard at work creating our very own portraits!

Hmm...I wonder if this looks just like me?

We read a Kevin Henkes book about a little mouse with a very different name.



Because she had a different name, the other mice teased her and used words that crumbled her heart. We talked about how our words can crumble people too. We passed around Mr. Crumbles and said something mean to him, each time crumbling a piece of him. He was a mess! So, we apologized one by one and tried to smooth him out, but no matter how hard we tried, he didn't look the same. We promised to never use such words again to anyone because we did not want to crumble anyone the way we crumbled Mr. Crumbles. We each signed a bandaid to make that promise and patched Mr. Crumbles up as best we could!

 Reading is such an adventure and we do a lot of reading in first grade! We learned about story maps this week and about the different parts of a story that we must discover when reading: the characters, the setting, the problem, the solution, and the author's purpose.

 Then, we read a story about a character named R.J. who had a very big problem: he never listened or followed directions.

We talked about R.J.'s solution to this problem. Then, we wanted to test how well WE listen and followed directions. So, we did a Busy Bear activity, listening closely to Mrs. Maggart's directions on how to color our bears.

Wow! I followed all of the directions!

Look at use listening!

 In Math, we will be using lots of Math tools to solve different problems when we are being mathematicians. We wanted to make sure that we knew the name of all of our tools and how to use them. We explored our math toolboxes, recorded, and labeled our tools in our Math Journals.

See? It looks the same!

Hmm...I can even measure my tools WITH a tool!

 There are lots of new rules and procedures in first grade. It is so important that we write our name and date on EVERYTHING. If we don't, it ends up in the "No Name" den, waiting to be claimed. Mrs. Maggart pleaded with us to always check the den because on Fridays when she cleaned the room, she would have to toss out any unwanted papers. We were so great about making sure all of our work was wanted!

 If we ever finish our work up early, we can choose a fun activity from the "I'm Done" board. There are so many language arts and math activities for us to do. Wow...how can we ever get bored?!

Each morning in first grade, we will be working on spelling and making words. This week, we had to learn 17 pretty important words: the names of all of our Tiger Team teammates. We had to unscramble names and find out whose name was whose. We were such rock star spellers!

 Mrs. Maggart loves to ask use review questions. It's super hard to remember things from the day before sometime, but if we keep it in our brains and correctly give the answer, we earn some Smart Beads! We are so proud to wear them around the school and show-off how super smart we are!

We read a book about invisible buckets and how those buckets can be filled and emptied. That affects how we feel each and every moment of our day.

So, we created our own buckets and then wrote messages to each other to fill our buckets up! What a fun way to get to know each other AND feel great!

Look at his bucket!

 We are making new friends every day! We learned that we can use a tool called a Venn diagram to compare and contrast two things. We decided to buddy up and see how our buddy and ourselves were different and how we were the same!

Getting to know each other

 In our classroom, we come to school each day and practice our 6 rules. Ask me to tell you each rule and show you the motions that help me remember each!

Sometimes we sit for a long time while we're learning so we love to stand up and take a break...a brain break that is! Ask me which brain break was my favorite this week!

If we are synergizing as a class, we can earn compliments for our leadership behavior. For each 25 baseballs we earn, we earn a class prize!

 Friday was such a super day! We started off the day with a birthday celebration!

Then, we headed to the cafeteria for a Sharpen Your Saw Pep Rally!

What a blast!

AND...it was Mrs. Snow's birthday!!! The entire school sang to her!

We also recieved a special letter one afternoon from someone who calls herself the Desk Fairy. We thought it was pretty cool but we didn't think anything of it. But guess what?? On Friday morning we came in and found that she had been in our classroom and had passed out some special awards AND special goodies!

 We finished our week by learning about the holiday on Monday that is the reason for us not attending school. We read about it in our book.

We talked about OUR classroom jobs and how each job is important to keep our classroom clean and running smoothly. Then, we choose the 3 jobs we would like to have this school year. We can't wait to learn what our new jobs are on Tuesday.

We are such a classroom of leaders because that is what we all agreed we want to be. Not peacebreakers like the silly character David we read about.

This is our class promise and we each signed it!

 What a great first week! We cannot wait for an exciting first grade year!

Love,