March 1st Weekly News

 Hello!  March definitely came in as a lion…maybe I need to watch the weather closer because I definitely was surprised by today’s snow!  Conference times will be coming home on Thursday.  I tried my best to get times that would work for you based on the purple slips that came back.

You will see in the curriculum update that we are beginning some very exciting units…especially in writing!  We will be using plastic bottles for our experiments and we would happily take them. 

Upcoming Events

March 7: PSC Meeting

March 11: Authors Breakfast: Join us anytime between 7:15-7:45 AM to read published work
March 17: Field Trip to PAC to see the BFG
March 21 and 22: Portfolio Conferences
March 23, 24, 25 & 28: No school for students

Curriculum Updates:

Readers' Workshop: This week we are continuing to study the characters in our books. We will learn that characters' feelings change and we can change our voices to match our characters' feelings and readers can retell how the character's feelings change. We can mark these parts with post-its to help us remember the important part and then readers can talk more about these parts by saying things such as, "This is important because...This got me thinking...One thing I notice..." We will also be looking for clues that help us know how to bring the characters to life such as: punctuation at the end, punctuation in the middle, special print (bold, italic, capital), dialogue and dialogue tags (whispered, shouted) and pictures.

Writers' Workshop: This week we are starting our "Writing Like Scientists" unit. Students will use what they know about writing informational writing to write about science concepts. During this unit we will use writing to explore the properties of matter: solids, liquids and gases. This fits nicely with our Solids and Liquids unit in science. Students will be engaging in the work that scientists do-developing and testing hypotheses, gathering data, and studying information for patterns-all at a first grade level! We will be conducting and writing about experiments as a class, and students will also have the opportunity to conduct their own experiments and write about them. Don't be surprised if this carries over to home and students want to conduct their own liquid experiments at home!

Word Study: New words this week are brother, sister, thing. We'll be doing some work with the ing chunk and also the /r/ sound at the end of words.

Math Workshop: We're starting a new unit in math this week, Comparisons in Data. In this unit students will be representing and comparing data, collecting their own data and representing it and solving comparison problems (Kim has 10 crayons. Sam has 3. How many more crayons does Kim have than Sam?) A parent note is coming home today with more information about this unit. This week we will be organizing and representing data (ie sorting and comparing bugs with legs and no legs), representing data using pictures, circles, and matching, asking and answering questions about data (How many more apples than bananas?) and comparing data and find how many more and how many fewer. We will also be comparing data sets with three categories and ask and answer questions about the data.

Science/Social Studies: We're starting to investigate liquids this week. We will be observing and describing four liquids (water, glue, shampoo and oil, and then learning more about their properties by investigating them in centers this week and next week. We'll be observing how they flow, how they feel, their color, whether they are opaque or transparent and how they mix with water. Lots of engaged scientists during this unit!

As always, let me know if you have any questions.

 Samantha