First Couple Weeks of School

The first few weeks of school have been very busy, I am sure your child has come home extremely exhausted!  We are still learning the expectation for our classroom and the school.  We have also started the routines of math, daily 5, and writing.  Here are a few highlights of what we have been doing these last few days, remember to ask you child all about it.

One our first activity was a name game.  Students had a pipe cleaner with the same color beads on it.  There goal was to go around and meet each person in the classroom.  They had to politely introduce themselves and share about their favorite school special.  Once they had done this they were to exchange beads.  By the end of the activity they had a variety of colors, and they had met each student in the room.  This was a great opportunity to learn each others names and get to know a little about one another.

Time to meet and greet everyone

Exchanging and collecting beads

 A routine we have been starting to learn is our daily 5 routine.  These are our centers for guided reading time.  It is an important time for students to practice reading, spelling words, writing, and it is  also the time they will meet in small group with me to learn reading skills.  Daily 5's website goes into great details about the purpose of each centers.  Please check out https://www.thedailycafe.com/daily-5.

Practicing Read to Self

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Building Stamina

This week we also started our math program, enVisions.  In this first topic we will be focusing on the concept of addition.  Our goal in first grade is to be able to add numbers to 20, and also to be able to fluently add to 10.   There will be a number of strategies that we will learn to be able to help us add quickly, and also to be able to solve addition word problems.  I will be sending home the fliers so that you can see what your child is working on.  Once we are in the routine of math I will start to put their homework within these fliers.  

Buddied up to play our addition math game

Learning to work together and play math games

In writing we have just been working on writing 1-2 sentences.  Our goal is to build stamina in writing and to remember that every sentence needs an end mark, right now we are working on periods.  

Painting our hippos to go with our summer stories

Everyone had a blast with the water color paints!