Weekly Update, February 28 - March 4

Welcome Back!

I hope everyone enjoyed the long rodeo weekend!  The kids were happy to be back and share stories about their rodeo adventures with each other.

♥ Love of Reading Update ♥
We did it!!!  The kids not only met our class goal of 500 books in the month of February, they SMASHED our goal and read an incredible 560 books!  Kids - I am SO proud of all of you!  You are such wonderful readers.  Our celebratory pizza party will be in the next few weeks.  I will send home information once I select the date.  Way to go, 1st grade readers!

This week in science and guided reading we are learning about beautiful bugs!  Each day we will learn about a different category of insects.  Today we learned about the characteristics of beetles.  The rest of the week we will learn about butterflies and moths and their life cycles, bees and wasps and how to tell the difference between them and flies, gnats and mosquitoes.  The kids are really excited for this unit!

In writing we are working on poetry.  Today the kids wrote a beetle acrostic poem on a picture of a beetle.  These turned out SO cute!  The kids will also write a "How To Be a Bee" poem and a "What Am I?" poem about a fly, gnat or mosquito.  The kids really enjoy poetry writing!  The kids will also get practice using a picture to guide their writing.

The kids' writing has really taken off over the last few weeks and it is SO exciting to see!  We have done a lot of work with word choice (specifically explicit nouns and strong verbs) and, as always, conventions.  It is great to see the kids use what they have learned in their writing.  You may hear your child mention our "demands for writing."  We have several demands for writing at this point in the year.  We review them several times each day.
Our demands for writing:
1.  Start each sentence with a capital letter.
2.  Write all names and proper nouns with a capital letter.
3.  End statement sentences with a period.
4.  End question sentences with a question mark.
5.  Use quotation marks to show when someone is talking.
6.  ALWAYS use a finger space between your words!
Kids - you are doing a great job of remembering to meet all our demands each time you write!  Parents - when you watch your child write, you can help your writer by asking him/her if he/she met the demands.  It's most helpful to ask your child what the demands are and then see if he/she can correct it independently.

The kids came home with Rainbow Words and they are due tomorrow.  In making words we are working on tricky homophones.  We are reviewing homophones we have already learned and learning some new ones too.

The kids enjoyed their creepy, crawly centers today!  The centers for the week include:
1.  Listening - The kids listened to Beautiful Bugs and then they made a Venn Diagram to compare Wood ants and Monarch butterflies.
2.  Science - The kids looked at several dozen different (plastic!) bugs and categorized them.  The kids made their own decisions about what categories to put the bugs in.  Thank you, parents, for the bugs!
3.  Writing - The kids looked at bug books.  They picked their favorite bug from the book, drew a picture of it and then wrote an adventure about it.
4.  Math - The kids made bugs out of pattern blocks.  Each child took a turn playing teacher; that child made a bug and then he/she taught the other kids how to make the bug.
5.  Writing - The kids made words out of different bug word chunks.

Our math chapters on shapes went great!  The kids learned to look at shapes in space and identify shapes by descriptions.  They also learned about lines of symmetry and following directions on a grid.  We will take our test on symmetry and directions tomorrow and then begin our study of measurement.  In measurement we will practice using rulers to measure items in inches and centimeters.

The kids enjoyed computers today.  If you'd like to see what they did, click on the blog posting directly below this one, Computers 2/28.

Have an A+ week!
Mrs. Johnston