Week 11/28/22 - 12/2/22
Our Week in First Grade: Authors’ Share, New Word Study Groups, Mystery Guest Readers, and So Much More!
What a great first week back after the Thanksgiving break!
Reading Workshop:
First graders successfully completed their five secret missions and earned their official Word Detective badges! They learned about some essential things that all readers must do while reading! But they aren’t done! This unit and their learning will continue!
We also earned another Mystery Guest Reader for all of our great reading homework! It’s a group effort to accumulate the hours and then earn a fun story read by a guest reader! Ms. Purvee’s class had Mrs. O’Neil from the front office visit, and Mrs. Babineau’s class had a visit from Mr. Rector!
Word Study:
This is the time of day when we learn about letters, sounds, phonics, phonemic awareness, spelling patterns, Power Words, and the like. This week we started a new way of learning during this time. We took both first-grade classes and split them into three different groups to best meet all learners’ needs. We will meet this way 3 to 4 times a week. We are off to a great start and excited about this new organization.
Writing:
Before the break students picked a favorite small-moment story that they had written during our unit and worked hard to make revisions and edits to make it the best it could be. Their stories were typed up and this past week they created illustrations and book covers. We celebrated all of their learning and hard work with an Authors’ Share! Our two classes got together and students had the opportunity to share their stories with one another. What amazing writers we have!
Math:
We began our third math unit this week. It will focus on number sense, addition, subtraction, doubles facts, partners to ten, some beginning place value concepts, and more. This week we worked on using the “counting on” and “counting back” strategy for adding and subtracting. We also started doing some building of numbers with tens frames to help us start noticing the group of 10 and the extra 1s in numbers 10-20.
In other news…
We had both a Social Emotional Wellness lesson with Ms. Spaulding and our first Health lesson with Nurse Hadly (which focused on germs).
We had a fantastic time visiting the Used Book Sale and send a huge thank you to Mrs. Berliner for organizing that event.
We also learned about two new online programs that we will start using in the classroom: Lalilo (a word study site) and Raz Kids (a reading site that students can access from home via the “Students” tab on the RES website. From the “Students” tab, click on “Class links” and you’ll see an icon for Raz Kids. Part of it is a leveled reading program where kids have access to many many books that are just right for them to practice their reading skills.
