We made it through our first five day week!
We have continued getting to know one another and building our classroom community. One way we building our classroom community is by having a daily morning meeting. Morning meeting has four components: a greeting, a share, an activity, and reading a morning message. This is a great time for students to learn each other's names, find out more about each other's likes/dislikes, and have fun together. We are working on strategies for what to do when you don't remember someone's name. We are asking, "What is your name?" and then taking a look at their eyes and hair and trying to remember their names. For share, we have done a lot of this or that questions, such as apples or bananas, cats or dogs, sleep in or wake up early. For this week's activity, we did a movement activity (also called an energizer) called "Alive, Awake, Alert, Enthusiastic!"
Each week, we read a poem and read it each day to improve our reading fluency. This week's poem was called "Apples, Apples." We read the poem each day and then on Fridays, we add it to our poetry binders. Students have the option to read their poetry binders during reading workshop.
In addition to all of our regular lessons, we did some assessments this week to get a baseline of students' writing and math skills. We talked about their job and my job during an assessment. We discussed how it is important to try your best and how it's okay not to know everything!
This week in Reading...
-We learned that readers get stronger by reading more and more! We added a tool to our reading bin called a "reading mat." The reading mat helps students make a plan for their reading and helps build stamina! The next day, we added post it notes to help us keep track of how many books we read. The next day, we looked at how many books we read the day before and set a goal to read even more!
-In phonics, we are working on reading and writing words with the short a sound. Students also have a phonics poem in their poetry binders to work on fluency and decoding skills.
This week in Writing...
-We learned how to plan our stories by touching and telling the story on each page. This helps students make sure that their stories have a beginning, middle, and end. Students are all at different stages in their writing, so we are working on helping all students feel comfortable and confident. ALL students are writers and ALL students have a story to tell! Writing is one of the hardest things we ask first graders to do.... We took a writing assessment this week and it will be amazing to compare their September writing assessment with their May/June writing assessment. The growth is amazing!
This week in Math...
-We practiced skip counting by 1s and 5s.
-We practiced making estimates and counting larger collections.
-We had time to explore our math tool kits and practice rolling dice the "first grade way" :) Shake, shake, drop!
-We played Penny Dice.
-We took our Math Benchmark.
For Theme Work, we started learning about apples.
-We wrote a list of things we know/think we know about apples.
-We read The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree and drew a picture of an apple tree during each season.
-We made a diagram of an apple tree.
-Next week we will learn about the parts of an apple and the life cycle of an apple.
-We also read the book Do Unto Otters and talked about how we should treat people the way we want to be treated. We made our classroom rules.
Housekeeping...
-Please send your child to school each day with a clean mask! It is also VERY helpful to have spare masks in your child's backpack in the event that their mask gets wet, broken, lost, or dirty.
-There will be a virtual LIVE open house next week. Be looking for more information from Ms. Gamache. This is a first for me, so it will be an adventure! The Open House will take place via a Google Meet link.
I hope you all have a great weekend! As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions or concerns. The best way to reach me is via email at kgreene@kitteryschools.com.
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