Author Visit, Raptor Presentation, and More! Highlights from the Week of May 22, 2023

 

Author Visit, Raptors Presentation, Story Publishing, and More!

Highlights from the Week of May 22, 2023

The week of May 22nd was filled with some very special opportunities and experiences!  First graders were treated to a Mystery Guest Reader (Ms. Purvee’s class enjoyed a book with Mrs. Gilbar and Mrs. Babineau’s class enjoyed a book with Ms. Darling!), an Author Visit with Diana Dunn (author of Pipsqueak’s Adventure, A True Story), and a visit with Raptors!  

In addition to all of that fun and learning we continued to learn about story elements during our Reading Workshop.  We started exploring the author’s message, theme, and/or lesson by reading two fantastic books, Giraffe Problems, and Penguin Problems by Jory John.  We are discovering that we can learn a lot through the characters in stories! 

Students chose a favorite fiction piece and have been polishing it up by making revisions, adding details, and editing to make it the best that it can be!  We will be sharing our stories between our two first grade classes soon!

During Math we are continuing to work on adding two digit numbers and have begun to learn about regrouping the tens and ones when necessary.  (We no longer call it “carrying” or “borrowing” but instead “regrouping”.)  Students are able to t build the numbers with Base 10 Blocks and manipulate and construct the numbers in a concrete way.  

Our new Word of the Week (W.O.W.) was contemplate. We have built quite a collection of fun and interesting words to add to our vocabulary and it is so fun to watch students use our new words and notice when they see them in books, or hear adults using them too!  

We were so busy this week that we didn’t take a lot of pictures, but enjoy the ones wee did get!  

IMPORTANT DATES TO REMEMBER:

• Powder Run: After school on Tuesday, June 6th

• Field Day: Thursday, June 15th 

• Last Day of School and Report Cards: Tuesday, June 20th (full day)

Highlights from the Week of May 15, 2023

Highlights from the Week of May 15, 2023

It is hard to believe that there is only about one more month left in this school year!  Wow!  The first graders are blooming and growing as quickly as all of the flowers and spring plants outside.  Their reading, writing, and math skills have come so far over the past year and it is exciting to see where they are at now.  

During reading, we are in the midst of our fiction unit and have been studying characters, their traits, personalities, feelings, and the changes they may show from the beginning to the end of a story. We have also continued to work on identifying story elements of the books we read and enjoy.  Next week we will be learning about the theme or messages that many stories have. 

We have been working on place value concepts in math, doing a lot of fun games and activities that have had us adding multiples of ten with 2-digit numbers.  Next week we will start working with 2-digit numbers that will involve regrouping the ones.  We use a wonderful tool called Base 10 Blocks that allow the students to construct the numbers as they work with them, making the math work very concrete and visual.  

Students have been loving our fiction writing unit!  It’s fun to see their creative energies flowing as they create characters, adventures, problems, and solutions.  We have been learning about the importance of adding great details and making your characters come to life!  

Other happenings this week include:

• Visits from second-grade students to share poetry with us

• A lesson on biomimicry involving trees and umbrellas - ask your student to explain!

• Learned some new long vowel spelling patterns: -ind, -ild, -ost, -old - olt

Learned a new W.O.W. which was perplexed and read a great story called Mr. Tiger Goes Wild to help us learn the meaning of this word