Weekly Update

Dear First Grade Families,

We have finished up another busy week! Next week will also be another busy, short week! It's hard to believe we're approaching the 50th day of school!

We learned about Veterans Day.  We learned what a veteran is and why we celebrate Veterans Day.  We also learned a song called "See the Veteran."  The students really enjoyed this song and were singing it a lot throughout the school day! The students were eager to share about the veterans in their lives.  I shared pictures of the veterans in my family.  Two of my grandparents (my grandmother and grandfather) were in the Army and served in World War II, one of my grandparents was in the Air Force, my brother served four years in the Coast Guard, and my husband was in the Army National Guard for 4 years.  He was deployed to Iraq from March 2006-March 2007. 

Mary and Arthur Gallant - Army 

*Fred Fowler - Air Force

Matt in Iraq 

*A friend of Matt's was making a children's book for his niece's school.  Hence, the teddy bear!

This week in reading, we continued our Word Detectives unit.  We learned that Word Detectives...
*Break the ending off the word, solve the beginning, and put it back together.

*Look out for vowel teams (i.e., ee, ea, ai).  We learned that "when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking and it usually says it's name."  This works in words like steal, pain, and boat.  We also talked about how there are always exceptions to the rule like GREAT! Word Detectives have to be FLEXIBLE!

*Look for parts of words or "chunks" they know.  We call this strategy "Chunky Monkey."  The students are excited to find small words within bigger words and word family chunks to help them solve tricky words!

*We also continued to look out for tricky beginning sounds -- blends and digraphs.  The students highlighted these in their poems AND were excited to see them in their math journal this week!

This week in writing, we took a couple of days to wrap up our small moment (narrative) unit.  We learned that small moments START, STAY, and END in the same place.  The students were also challenged to write two small moment stories this week that were easy to read.  It is great to see their progress since the beginning of the school year! We also started our non-fiction writing unit.  The students will be writing "all about" books or "teaching books" about topics they are experts in!

To break up the writing units, we did a SUPER fun project called "Disguise a Turkey."  We read the stories "Turkey Trouble" and "Turkey Trick or Treat."  The students were then given a turkey and told they had to disguise it to keep it safe for Thanksgiving.  The students could disguise their turkey to be anything they wanted using many different colors of construction paper.  Their creativity was amazing! We had lots of super heroes, princesses, Fort Nite characters, a pirate, a little brother, and even some Pokemon characters.  I'm told they're super strong....

Some of our turkeys in disguise.  I will need to get a picture of the other turkeys next week!

This week in math, we continued working on addition and subtraction strategies.  The students also were also given a large number of erasers and asked to estimate how many they had and then work as a group to count them and record the actual number.  The students also had to count all of the chair legs in the classroom.  This was a big task! We had counts ranging from 45-89.  The actual number of chair legs was 88! One students, Evelyn, was right on the nose!

This summer, I was on the hunt for these "hashtag" blocks in the Target Dollar Spot.  The other day, I stumbled upon some and bought FOURTEEN packs! Yesterday, the students had some time to experiment with the blocks at their table spots.  They had a lot of fun!

Looking ahead to next week...

*No school on Monday, 11/12

*Parent-teacher conferences on 11/14

*Field trip to Seacoast Science Center 11/15 (I will send home information for chaperones on Tuesday)

*No school week of 11/19