January 26-30

January 2009

 

Click the thumbnail above to view pictures from the past two weeks via Picasa.

I hope everyone enjoyed the snow day on Wednesday!  This week we celebrated the Lunar New Year by making Year of the Ox puppets, paper lanterns, and having a group from Cornell show the first graders how to use chopsticks and do a traditional lion dance!  The students each got a "lucky money" envelope with a chocolate coin at the end of the presentation.  

We looked at "igh" words and at words that start with g with either the /g/ sound, as in go, or the /j/ sound, as in giant.  We will continue to study letters with more than 1 sound (a,e, i, o,u, c, g...) so that we can try each letter sound when figuring out unfamiliar words when we are reading.

In math we used base-10 blocks to add two and three digit numbers and reviewed using the greater than > and less than < sign.  We also played a variety of math games based around money: trading in pennies, nickels, and dimes for dollars, and trading in one, five, and ten dollar bills for one hundred dollar bills.

Next week's sight words will be: yes, does, her, room, need

This week I attended a district-wide Literacy Academy where I was able to learn about Kidspiration, a program installed on the school computers that allows students to create a variety of graphic organizers to document their ideas.  I hope to implement this tool in our room in the coming weeks!

I also finished the mid-year assessments this week, which included a writing sample and having students solve some math problems and explain how they figured them out.  On Monday (February 2) all first grade teachers across the district will be out of class to evaluate the writing samples together.  Richie will be in our class that day.   

Please note there is no school next Friday, February 6 or the week of February 16-20.

Report cards that come out in early March and will be discussed during conferences.  Please sign up below for a conference time and call or email me if you need to schedule it on a later date.