Weekly Update, November 14 - 18

Hello Super First Graders and Spectacular First Grade Families!

I hope everyone had a nice weekend! The kids are still talking about our Awesome America week! They really enjoyed this unit and they LOVED meeting Major Russell! The kids loved listening to him talk, asking questions and learning about his uniform. They did an excellent job of writing thank you notes to him. They thanked him for visiting our class and they asked a lot of good questions in their notes too! It was a fun day!

Today we began our social studies and guided reading/writing unit on Thanksgiving; we are learning about the Pilgrims and Indians. There are several fun projects planned and the kids will come home with a lot of cute Thanksgiving decorations. Today we read a neat story called "The Tale of the Bear's Tipi." The kids learned about tipis and learned that there are two ways to spell it: tipi and tepee. After the story, the kids made their own tipis and wrote about what it would be like to live in a tipi. This was so much fun! On Tuesday we will read "The North Wind and the South Wind" to learn about pueblos and the kids will make their own pueblos. On Wednesday we will learn about the history of The First Thanksgiving and the kids will create their own cornucopia and write about what they are thankful for this year. Our studies on Thursday and Friday will focus on Pilgrims. On Thursday the kids will learn about how Pilgrims had a very different life than we do. The kids will compare and contrast elements of our lives to those of the Pilgrims. On Friday the kids will learn about what it was like to be a Pilgrim kid. They will decorate their own pilgrim kids to bring home.

The kids had a great time with the Thanksgiving centers today. The centers for the week include:
1. Listening - The kids listened to a story called Giving Thanks, written by an Indian Chief. They created a traditional Native American story sack. They decorated the bag with symbols and then filled it with found objects. To use the story sack, the kids pull an object from the bag and tell a story about it. They had so much fun gathering objects and sharing their stories!
2. Art/Social Studies- The kids used the inside of a paper grocery bag to write an Indian symbol story. The kids received a page of symbols and then they used them to tell a story. They could only use the symbols (no words).
3. Writing - The kids did a neat color poem. They colored a picture of pottery and then used the colors they chose to write a poem about it.
4. Math - Pottery geometry and Indian Symbol addition. The kids created patterns with pottery and they used symbols to write number sentences.
5. Reading - The kids read Thanksgiving books and did a Thanksgiving word sort.

The kids have new spelling words this week. In addition to our spelling words, we have Thanksgiving theme words. The kids came home with Rainbow Words and they are due tomorrow. In spelling and making words we are working on long vowel sounds. The kids have a new spelling challenge this week! If the whole class spells Thanksgiving and turkey (another alliteration test!) correctly, the class will get a prize.

We took our chapter 8 test in math today.  There were some difficult concepts with related facts and fact families, so we spent a little extra time to cover the material. We will begin chapter 9 later in the week. This chapter focuses on groups of 10 and place value. The kids will practice counting in 10s and adding on by 1s, writing number sentences and identifying numbers by looking at pictures of groups of 10s and 1s.

We have a fun activity planned for computers later this week. If you'd like to see what we’ll do, stop back at the end of the week to view the blog posting called “Computers, 11/18.”

Have an A+ week!
Mrs. Johnston