First Grade Week of Giving 2017Dear families, This past week was a joyful one for first grade. Each year, the first graders engage in a Week of Giving prior to winter break to help them reflect on others and understand their own privilege. This year, each day students participated in at least one act of kindness to give back to their local and external communities. It was awesome to see their excitement to learn about the project of the day and to witness them diving into this meaningful work. Here is what we did: Monday: baked cookies and brownies for police and firefighters; made paper snowflakes and snowmen and attached them to homemade cards Tuesday: wrote and painted cards for a 4-year-old girl named Ruby who is at Tuft's Children's Hospital in Boston; they also created jeweled snowflakes for her to hang in her room. Click here to learn more about Ruby. Wednesday: made bird feeders with pinecones, lard, and seeds and strung cereal on twine to hang in the woods for our local birds Thursday: made it through the snowy parking lot to read books with our Farmhouse friends; made cards for active military to be sent with a candy bar care package to thank our service men and women for their dedication and to let them know we are thinking of them during the holidays. We used Operation Shoebox to get the package to the troops. Click here to learn more. Friday: wrote reflections on our week and listed what we were able to accomplish; thought about which activity was most meaningful to us and why; brainstormed ways we can continue giving with our families when we are not in school
My heart is full when I think of the kindness and love the kids showed this week. Thank you all for instilling the importance of giving in your children! A big thanks to all who helped out and donated supplies this week. It made it all go very smoothly and we appreciate it. Pajama Day, Book Exchange, Cocoa & Movie Fun! To cap off our week we had our annual first grade Pajama Day and Book Exchange. The kids were so adorable in their PJs with their special stuffed animals from home. We played a left/right story swapping game and gave kids a chance to practice identifying their left and right side! After the books were swapped over and over, each child had one to unwrap. They each opened the book and read the inscription inside to find out why it was a friend's favorite. Everyone went home with a new book, which we hope they will enjoy for years to come. After our book exchange we settled in to have some hot cocoa and cookies and watch a short holiday movie. We watched Click-Clack-Moo Christmas Farm and kids enjoyed the silly humor. Thanks to Heather for making homemade hot cocoa and to Cindi for providing some vegan treats for those who needed them. Later in the day, kids got to practice for Winterfest on stage in their PJs! What fun :) Curricular NotesMath
- Chapter 6, ordinal numbers from 1st to 10th and vocabulary - Position words (above, below, beneath, next to, beside, etc.) - Using a starting line - Ordering events Writing - Week of Giving cards - Week of Giving reflections Reading - Listened to The Chanukkah Guest by Eric A. Kimmel and debated about whether it was fiction or non-fiction (spoiler alert - this book about a bear dining on latkes in Bubba Brayna's kitchen is fictional!) - Finished My Father's Dragon - Chose and practiced books to read to Farmhouse friends Spelling and Handwriting - Lowercase l in handwriting - Adding an s suffix to closed syllable words to show there is more than one (cat, cats) - Learned the s at the end can sound like /s/ or /z/ Have a fantastic weekend! Katie
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Dear families, This week students spent time getting to know the new teacher who will be taking the lead in first grade in January. Seema Vallone is a talented, experienced educator who has already made her warm presence felt in our class over the past week. She has taken the lead with morning meeting, designed some phonics word work activities for students, and read stories aloud. As the weeks go on, Seema will take on more and more responsibility; I have no doubt that the students are in capable hands and will learn a lot from this gifted educator. Please join me in welcoming her to our community! If you have not had a chance to come by to say hello and introduce yourself, know you are welcome to do so when you have a free moment. We had our last time with this round of Middle School Literacy Helpers on Friday. They helped first graders understand the difference between nonfiction and fiction and read a Time for Kids magazine with small groups about volcanoes. They then helped them analyze the text and share something they learned. We had a chance to circle up at the end of the period to reflect on our time together. Students shared that they liked having an older student help them read, they enjoyed the activity where they wrote about crystals, that the Literacy Helpers really gave them some good ideas for the pages of their All About Me books, and that they just really loved spending special time with them each week. We hope we get some repeat sign-ups for next semester, as this group of students was particularly great to work with. Next week we will engage in our first grade week of giving. We will do projects to give back to our local and external communities each day and we will have a pajama day and movie to celebrate our success on Friday. Kids are allowed to come to school in their pajamas and may bring one small stuffed animal. They should have real shoes and warm pjs, as we will go outside as usual. On that day we also do a book exchange. I sent home the instructions, but students are to bring a new or gently used book wrapped in plain paper with no tag if they want to participate in the swap. They should write inside why it is a special book to them along with their name. Everyone who chooses to join will go home with someone else's favorite! If your child would like to participate but cannot get a hold of a book, we would be happy to provide them with one so they can play. Let me or Seema know if you need help with this or have any questions. Participation is voluntary. Curricular Highlights Math - Completed chapter 5, Geometry (plane and solid shapes) - Identified characteristics to name plane shapes (sides, corners) - Identified characteristics to name solid shapes (faces, corners) - Shape patterns with solid and plane shapes; locating mistakes in patterns; notion that patterns have to repeat to be a pattern - Creating our own patterns with pattern blocks or cut paper shapes - Sorting shapes by different characteristics - Identifying solid shapes in real life objects Reading - Did our second round of 20 minutes in stamina reading! Kids are loving this dedicated time to read - Continued the chapter book My Father's Dragon by Ruth Stiles Gannett and practiced comprehension skills in detail recall and visualization (only one chapter to go!) - Read Time for Kids and answered comprehension questions - Read Click, Clack Moo: Cows That Type with Mrs. Vallone - Practiced fluency (smooth, well-paced reading) with controlled readers to practice the -ck ending - Continued comprehension and fluency work in book clubs as well as responding to reading in writing Spelling & Handwriting - Introduced the concept of a syllable (a word or part of a word with one vowel sound; can be found by clapping out a word like el-e-phant or hot-dog) - Introduced closed syllables (like cat where the vowel is short because the t is closing in the vowel) and open syllables (where the vowel says its name like in the word go because no consonant is closing it in) - Dividing syllables by finding the consonants between two vowels and 'chopping' between them (hap/pen; sun/set; Jus/tin) - Sorting words into their syllable counts - Review week for sight words; wrote super sentences using many commonly misspelled sight words - Practiced writing lowercase i and lowercase e in handwriting Writing - Weekend News to include at least three sentences - Review of conventions (uppercase starter, lowercase letters in the middle, spaces, and a stop sign - period, question mark or exclamation point - at the end) - Family webs Social Studies - Continued our discussion of family and began webs prompted by, "When you think of family, what do you think of?"
- Read A Chair for My Mother by Vera B. Williams and discussed how family, neighbors, and friends come together in times of need to help each other. Students then wrote in their reading response journals about how the community helped the little girl and her mother after they lost everything in a fire. |
AuthorKatie Nelson Archives
January 2018
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