Weekly Update, January 14 - 18

Hello Amazing First Graders and Awesome First Grade Parents!

No School
There is no school on Monday, January 21 in observance of Martin Luther King Day.

100th Day Homework Information
Thursday, January 24 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 Tuesday, January 22. Please let me know if you have any questions.

This week we are having career week and studying 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. 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. We will learn to write "How To" poems for our Martin Luther King, Jr. study and the kids will write a poem on how to be kind. 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 are working on subtraction strategies in math. The 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, 1/18.”

Have an A+ week!
Mrs. Johnston