Weekly Update, January 17 - 20

Hello Amazing First Graders and Awesome First Grade Parents!

Welcome back! I hope everyone enjoyed the 3 day weekend!

100th Day Homework Information
Wednesday, January 25 is the 100th day of school! To celebrate, the kids will bring in a collection of 100 small items. Your child brought home a paper today for the project and an information letter. This project is due on Monday, January 23. Please let me know if you have any questions.

This week we will study community helpers. Thank you so much to the parents who are able to come in and talk with the kids! The kids absolutely love having visitors in the classroom. Today we learned about community helpers and what they do. We learned how to interview someone to get ready for our first visitor. This morning we had a visit from Sydney’s dad, Mr. Johnson, who is a CPA. The kids loved having a visitor and they learned a lot! On Wednesday Dr. Hackler, a friend of mine, will come in to talk about physical therapy. On Thursday, Owen’s dad, Mr. Bakken will come to talk to us about his work with TEP. We will have another visitor on Thursday, Mrs. Walker, owner of CrossFit Northwest Tucson, will talk with the kids about exercise and nutrition. On Friday, William’s mom, Dr. Neal, will talk to the kids about being a veterinarian and her work with the Humane Society. The kids had a great time today and they are looking forward to the rest of the week!

In writing the kids will get more practice using good ideas to write thank you notes! Each community helper will receive thank you notes from the class. Last week we learned how to write "How To" poems during our Martin Luther King, Jr. study and the kids wrote a poem on how to be kind. They did an excellent job with this and many of them mentioned they liked writing poetry! This week they will get more practice writing "How To" poems about community helpers. At this point in the year we are doing a lot of really great writing in writers’ workshop! The kids are still working on their snowman stories from last week. They are learning about the six traits and going through the writing process of pre-writing, drafting, editing and revising. Their writing has come so far and I have loved reading their stories!

In reading we are working on reading words with “Bossy R.” (er, ir, ur). The kids are learning to create words with different types of bossy r.

The kids came home with Rainbow Words and they are due tomorrow. In making words we will continue our ABC order practice. The kids did an amazing job of alphabetizing to the first letter. We are now working on alphabetizing to the second letter. We will also work on words with the "le" chunk, like our spelling word people.

The kids enjoyed our community helper centers! The centers for the week include:
1. Listening - The kids listened to "School," a pattern book about things that are seen at school. The kids followed the "I see" pattern to create their own list of things that are seen at school.
2. Social Studies - The kids got firsthand experience writing a police report! We discussed how police officers need to be watching carefully and pay attention to little details. Today during center time, another teacher came in the class and said things and did things. When she left, the kids tested their observation and memory! They recorded a variety of things about the teacher's visit to see if they would make a good eye witness! They had so much fun with this!
3. Writing - The kids practiced what it would like to be a news reporter. They interviewed teachers and kids in our class and the surrounding classes and wrote a newspaper report.
4. Math - The kids practiced finding addition patterns by completing adding with 0 and 1 problems.
5. Reading – The kids used puzzle pieces to read and write silly sentences.

We began chapter 13 in math. The kids brought an information letter home to you. This chapter focuses on subtraction strategies such as using a number line and counting back.

We have a fun activity planned for computers on Friday. If you’d like to see what we’ll do, please check back on Friday for the blog posting called “Computers, 1/20.”

Have an A+ week!
Mrs. Johnston