February 23 - 27

This week we welcomed Ryan back to the classroom!  He has done a great job learning the routines and reconnecting with everyone.  I've been really proud of how the students have been eager to help him and include him.

We started studying "fact families" in math, which involves making 2 addition equations and 2 subtraction equations using a set of 3 numbers (e.g. 5+3=8, 3+5=8, 8-3=5, 8-5=3).  We also introduced name collection boxes, which are various ways to make or say a number (e.g. 12 = 1 dozen, twelve, 6+6, 14-2, etc.), and the addition/subtraction table which can help students see patterns in addition and subtraction.

We also learned two new reading strategies and practiced using each:
1. paying attention to ?, !, words in bold, italics, underline or otherwise different to read more fluently and with expression, not like a robot.
2. picking a word from a book to remember and try to use in conversation/writing that same day to expand your vocabulary.

In writing we addressed the first grade goal of using the words like "First, Next, Then, Last" to organize our sentences when we wrote instructions for how to do something.  I will have copies of your child's writing available for you to take home at his/her conference next week.

Please remember that students will be dismissed at 11:00 on Thursday and Friday next week.  

We would really appreciate additional tissues and glue sticks for the classroom.  

Thanks so much for your ongoing generosity!

Next week's sight words will be: door, just, last, more, pick

Enjoy these pictures from the past two weeks:

February 9-13

Happy Valentine's Day!  I hope you enjoy all the beautiful crafts your child brought home this week.   Many of the crafts will be available during choice time for the next few weeks for anyone who missed that day or wants to make more.  We will make Borax crystals in different colors later in the year.  Directions for making Borax crystals yourself are available online.    Thanks to Mary Jo for providing many of the supplies and to all the volunteers who helped out! I will post pictures of the festivities here soon. 

Please remember there is no school next week (February 16-20).  When we return we will begin learning about dinosaurs in preparation for our field trip to the Museum of the Earth on March 9.  In addition to learning science, specifically paleontology, one of the objectives of the field trip is to develop friendships between the schools as the students will eventually end up at the same middle school.  We will practice some conversation skills to help facilitate social interaction between the students, especially on the bus ride when students will be sitting with their buddies.

This week in writing we responded to letters from our field trip buddies at Northeast Elementary School!  We also worked on describing a specific event in great detail, by explaining each step we took to make a wheel and axle design in science using words like First, Next, Then and Last to organize our writing.  That piece of writing will be on display in the hall outside the classroom and you can see more examples of your child's writing during conferences in the first week of March.  If you have not already scheduled a conference time, you can do so below or I will contact you after the break.

This week in math we reviewed drawing a picture for a word problem, using "doubles" addition facts to solve similar problems (e.g. if 5+5=10 then 5+6=11), and using function machines more.  We also used tangrams and played some money games with $1, $5, $10, $50 and $100.  Please continue to help your child memorize the "doubles" addition facts from 0-10 and to challenge your child to work with two and three digit numbers at home, too! 

In reading we created a display of the reading strategies we have been learning and practicing at school.  The strategies are organized by what they help readers with: comprehension/understanding, accuracy/reading words correctly, fluency/reading smoothly, or expanding vocabulary/noticing, learning, and using new words.  

Recent "accuracy" strategies we have been learning include:

1. Skip an unknown word, read to the end of the sentence or page, then go back and reread so you can make a better guess about the unknown word.

2. Trying each sound a letter can make (hard/soft c and g, long/short a, e, i, o, u)

3. Looking for word parts (words within words like "end" in "blend" and blends like "bl")

When we read we also practice accuracy by sounding out all the letters in a word (not guessing after the 1st letter), using the pictures for clues, and thinking about what would make sense in the sentence/story.

 

We need tissues and ziploc bags (sandwich or quart size) for the classroom!
Thanks for your generosity.


We will study these sight words in the last week of February:
hear, mine, tell, were, time

February 2 - 6

I spent Monday alongside the other first grade teachers in the district evaluating recent student writing samples.  The results of your child's specific work will be discussed at conferences (see below), but in general I found that our students have great ideas of things to write about, use good descriptive vocabulary, and are skilled at using phonetic spelling for words they don't know.  Some common goals for the class to work on included using capital and lower case letters appropriately, using transition words between ideas (first, next, then, last...) and using a wider variety of sentence structures.

While I was at this meeting Richie helped the students experiment with wheels and axles.  They configured different designs using large and small wheels in a variety of combinations.  See the pictures below and the Foss Science Balance and Motion website for more information about the experiments we have been doing and an interactive "roller coaster design" game your whole family can enjoy.

You'll also see pictures of us celebrating Sophia's birthday this week with cupcakes that had mini marshmallow snowpeople on them, and a applesauce and cinnamon dough project with Sophia's Mom and brother.  You may have seen some of the extra dough come home on Wednesday afternoon in a Ziploc bag.  Your child can use the dough to make something and set it out to dry for a few days and it will harden into a cinnamon-scented masterpiece!  MaryJo suggests that you bake it at 200 degrees for about an hour to thoroughly dry it out.  Our masterpieces will come home at the end of next week.

This week in math we looked at patterns in addition facts, such as what happens when you add zero or add one, and when you switch the order of numbers (2+3=5, 3+2=5, 5=2+3, and 5=3+2).  We also started to memorize the "doubles" (1+1, 2+2, 3+3 ...) and the pairs that add up to 10 (0+10, 1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5).  Please help your child practice those kinds of problems at home so they can become automatic and use those facts to help them solve similar problems.  Up until this point we have been using manipulatives like pennies, fingers, calculators, or drawing a picture to solve addition problems, and throughout the rest of the year we will be encouraging students to do more "mental math" and build off the addition facts they have memorized.  For example, if you know 6+6=12 then you can easily figure out 6+7.  Many of the students are using this strategy already in addition problems but aren't as comfortable using it in subtraction problems.

We also introduced the Function Machine in math, where students have to figure out the "rule" that is being applied to numbers.  This is very similar to the Frames and Arrows number patterns students have been doing, but it is usually displayed with a box showing numbers going in and out, and then the input and output numbers are in a table or list.  It can be a bit of an abstract concept for students and the visual organization often confuses them, so I try to simplify it by asking students how to get from the first number (input) to the second number (output). 

This week we wrote a friendly letter to our buddies in first grade at Northeast Elementary School who will be going on the field trip to the Museum of the Earth with our class on March 9.  We should be receiving letters from them soon and will communicate with our pen pals throughout the rest of the school year!

Next week we will study these wight words: 
gave, keep, house, name, had


Please make sure your child has not accidentally brought home someone else's snow pants, and be sure that your child's name is in every article of clothing that comes to school!  Also make sure your child has extra pants, socks, and underwear here at school for when snow accidentally gets clothes wet during recess.

Please note that students are dismissed at 11:00 on both Thursday, March 5 and Friday, March 6.  Conferences will take place both afternoons.  Scroll down to sign up for a conference time if you have not already done so (I will email you or send a note to confirm your requested day/time).

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.

Music Concert Videos & Inauguration Reflections

January 19 - 23

This week I spent two days evaluating students' reading and math skills in the library on an individual basis while Ms. Bartimer was in the classroom.  Since this was a short week filled with special events and testing, we will continue to work with these words next week: eat, give, little, right, there.


On Tuesday the class read the book Martin's Big Words about Martin Luther King Jr. and saw the slideshow below showing all 44 US Presidents before watching the inauguration on TV with the rest of the Annex:

In math we worked with the inequality sign < and pretended it was a mouth trying to eat the bigger number.  I try to reinforce on the concept that the mouth wants the larger number and focus on the term "greater than" before moving on to read the inequality from left to right using either "greater than" or "less than."  For example, we are reading 3 < 4 as "4 is greater than 3" right now, but eventually students should be able to read it as "3 is less than 4."  It was interesting to observe that students saw the equal sign = as only being used to point to the answer in an equation (e.g. 5 + 6 = 11) and not as meaning "the same as," so we reviewed that it can also be used without any addition/subtraction (as in 45 = 45).  This week we also reviewed the values of base-10 blocks as representing two-digit and three-digit numbers, using the terms "ones place," "tens place," and "hundreds place."

On Thursday we got to hear the local Beauty and the Beast Storytellers tell three tales.  One was about a giant pumpkin with great sound effects provided by the audience, another was about a ghost catcher who outsmarted the ghosts, and the third was about a forgetful boy who repeated whatever someone told him.  Ask your child to fill in the details for you!

On Friday morning we had a visit from the Museum of the Earth public program coodinator, Samantha Sands, to talk about our field trip on March 9.  We also had a brief video chat with our partner class at Northeast Elementary School using Skype!  On Friday afternoon we learned about momentum by making foam race tracks for marbles.  The lesson was based around the concept that if the marble had a longer, steeper slope to roll down it would be going faster - eventually fast enough to not fall out of a loop or twist in the track.  Look for pictures of those experiments to be posted here soon....

A reading strategy we are starting to use is to think about spelling patterns (e.g. "ce" usually sounds like "s") and to try both sounds a vowel can make when sounding out unknown words.  We examined the spelling pattern "ee" and "ea" that usually sounds like long e, and made a list of such words for reference when we are reading and writing.  We also reviewed the two sounds vowels can make and how a silent e at the end of a word can signal the long sound (aka letter name). 

Ask your child if he/she can name the pictures we are using to represent each vowel sound:

long a: acorn       long e: eagle       long o: OK sign

short a: apple        short e: egg        short o: octopus

long i: eyeball       long u: unicorn

short i: itchy       short u: umbrella

Finally, we are almost finished reading aloud the third book by local author Ruth Stiles Gannett, The Dragons of Blueland.  Next week we will begin another classic, Mr. Popper's Penguins.