This blog will cover this week and next. As you know, I will be in Texas Wednesday as my new little grandson, Chase Ellison, is due to be born at any minute! The children will be in excellent hands with John Schiaparelli substituting. He knows first grade and is a great teacher.
At a special Town Meeting Friday, we enjoyed a beautiful morning celebrating International Peace Day. We listened to several of our lower school students read their own interpretations of what peace means to them, sang together and, along with the whole lower school, added rocks we had painted to a peace symbol in the center courtyard. It really was a very nice and peaceful morning. In class we read the book What Does Peace Feel Like? by Vladimir Radinsky, which went along well with our study of the senses during our human body science unit. We used our five senses to think about what peace "feels" like, "sounds" like, "smells" like, "tastes" like, and "looks" like. Check out our "peace people" in the windows of the first grade hall to "see" our thoughts. If the rest of the world could think like our children, the world would certainly be a better place.
In Math, we'll be counting combinations of pennies and nickels, and practice exchanging pennies for nickels. We'll learn a new math game called the "Penny Plate Game" to give us both concrete and mental math practice for complements of 10. The following week we'll work with both addition and subtraction number models and number stories.
In Reader's Workshop, we will continue to talk about and practice strategies for figuring out "tricky" words. We have formed partnerships and the children will be working with their partners to figure out tricky words by "coaching" them to use all they know rather than just telling them the word. We will also talk about and practice reading with a smooth storyteller voice by implementing the strategies of going back and rereading and reading with a voice that isn't too s-l-o-w or too fast. We'll also learn that noticing and using punctuation helps us read more smoothly. Reading with a smooth storyteller voice will help us to better understand what we read.
This week our word work will focus on words with short i and the phonograms _id, _ig, and _in. Next week we will focus on the phonograms _ip, _it, and _ill.
In Writer's Workshop, as we continue our personal narrative writing on the small moments of our lives, we will establish partnerships for writing. We'll focus more on "sketching" rather than drawing with a lot of detail so that we can get to the important work of getting the words down. We'll work on planning details for our stories, learning how to tell our story across our hands. We'll read a book written by some of our very own Shorecrest student authors, Jack and Hannah S. What a great mentor text for my young writers to hear the "small moments" of Jack and Hannah's lives written and published! Also, as we have been learning to stretch words for reading, we will practice stretching words to help us write them. The children are seeing that the strategies we use to help us as readers, we can also use to help us as writers.
In handwriting, we will continue to work on lowercase letters.
Dates to Remember:
No school for students on Thursday, October 4.
Professional Development Day - Friday, October 12th - No school for students
Picture Retake Day -Tuesday, October 23rd
Fall Festival - Wednesday, October 31st. The costume parade will begin at 8:30. The children will be dismissed to the Festival at 9:45.
Poetry in the Park - Thursday, November 8th - Mark your calendars now!
Volunteers this week:
Wednesday - Library Check-out - 2:10 - David Nguyen and Kristen Danielson
Thursday - Math Game - 10:30 - David Richardson
Friday - Art - 9:15 - Charlene Hosseini
Friday - Parent Reader - 2:20 - Lorraine Thorpe
Volunteers week of 10/1:
Wednesday - Library Check-out - 2:10 - Kim Gross and Chris Dubroff
Friday - Art - 9:15 - Kristen Danielson
Friday - Parent Reader - 2:20 - Sharon Cannella
Take care. I will post pictures soon of my sweet little Chase!
Susan
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