Weekly Update, January 9 - 13

Hello Stupendous First Graders and Super First Grade Parents!

Reminders
* There is no school on Monday, January 16 in observance of Martin Luther King Day.
* Community helper week is next week! We are studying fire fighters, police officers, doctors, dentists, teachers and coaches. If you would be able to come to our class to talk about your career, please let me know! The kids love having visitors in the class and they learn so much.

This week we continue our guided reading, writing and science study on weather. Today we learned about snow. We learned characteristics of snow and how snow is created. Tomorrow we will learn about rain and on Wednesday we will learn about wind.

On Thursday we will transition to a social studies mini-unit on Martin Luther King, Jr. On Thursday we will learn about MLK's life and the kids will answer open ended questions about MLK. On Friday we will learn about, and watch a short excerpt from his famous "I Have A Dream" Speech. The kids will make a cloud "I Have A Dream" mobile and they will write dreams for their family, community and world.

We are continuing our 6 traits study in writing. This week we will focus on ideas and conventions. This week the kids will write a story about meeting a snowman. To get started, the kids got a sheet with conversation bubbles and they wrote a conversation between themselves and the snowman. This helped them get great ideas for their story. Tomorrow they will turn their conversation into a story and on Wednesday they will edit the story.

The kids came home with Rainbow Words and they are due tomorrow. The kids did such a great job with the bonus word last week and this week our bonus word is temperature. This week in making words we will work on alphabetizing words to the first letter.  We will also learn to identify contractions and learn what two words make a contraction.  The kids will do a fun snowman sort to study contractions.

In reading we are working on reading words with long e and o sounds. The kids are learning all the different ways letters can form that sound.

The kids enjoyed our weather and MLK centers. The centers for the week include:
1. Listening - The kids listened to a story on Brainpop about the water cycle. They used complete sentences to write 3 things they learned.
2. Science - The kids hypothesized about what happens when things get wet. They put tiny drops of water on different items (a sponge, wax paper, foil, Kleenex, paper towel). They used their observations to decide if these items would make good rain gear.
3. Writing - The kids made a  spin chart to demonstrate the water cycle.  They used the story starter, "On a rainy day, I like to" to tell a story with strong ideas and good conventions.
4. Math - The kids put major events of MLK's life in order. Once they ordered them, they created a timeline of his life.  They also solved mitten addition problems and practiced graphing.
5. Reading - The kids read 1:1 with me. We focused on reading strategies for difficult words.

We began chapter 12 in math today. Your child brought home a parent letter with information. The chapter focuses on addition to 12. The kids will use a number line to count on to solve vertical and horizontal addition problems. The chapter also reviews doubles and doubles plus one.

We have a fun activity planned for computers this week. If you’d like to see what the kids will do, please check the blog on Friday for the posting called, “Computers, 1/13.”

Have an A+ week!
Mrs. Johnston