November 16 - 20

First graders got to enjoy a special turkey lunch in honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday. We are thankful for the family members who came to visit that day! Please remember that students will be dismissed at 1:20 on Wednesday, November 25 and there is no school on Thursday, November 26 or Friday, November 27.



This week we practiced making predictions when we read. We talked about good predictions vs. silly predictions. We learned that a good prediction uses both your schema (what you already know about a topic) and some evidence (clues you can see). We are using this prompt for making predictions "I think __________ because ________." For example, "I think they will go to the park because their mom said if they cleaned up their room they could go and they cleaned it up." That word "because" is key!

We studied words that start with "sm" as in smile, smell, small, smash, and smart. Our new sight words are: went, do, my, he, she.

We also practiced finding groups of ten to make counting a large set of objects easier. In a group of 23 objects we found two groups of ten, then practiced counting them like this "10, 20, 21, 22, 23." It is hard for many students to jump from counting by 10s to counting by 1s. We have also been reviewing tally marks (reading them correctly is much easier than writing them) and different ways to make 10.

We have been discussing what strategies help us to play the games Rush Hour Jr. (in videos below) and Cover Your Tracks, which both require spatial reasoning, planning a sequence of moves, and thinking about alternate solutions.



Students have discovered that many of the strategies that help in those games also help in other situations:

• make sure you know the rules and have everything you need before you start
• the more you practice, the better you get
• don't give up (keep trying)
  
• stop and think about what to do next
  

This week we used Skype to have a webchat with a first grade teacher and a technology integration teacher in Ithaca, NY! We will be chatting with their first graders in December to share ideas about what we are learning, to compare what first grade is like here vs. there, and to develop our communication skills. Special thanks to our technology integration support staff for helping make it go smoothly.