December 14th Weekly Update

Hello,

First graders continue to stay busy as winter break sneaks up on us! With the colder weather, please be sure to send warm clothes with your child everyday. Extra mittens/gloves and socks are also a good idea! Even if we aren’t able to go outside for recess, we want to make sure students are prepared and are bundled up at the end of the day. Thank you!

Next Wednesday, December 21st we will be having Grinch day in our classroom. The Grinch Who Stole Christmas is one of my favorite holiday books! We will be doing a few activities and searching for Dr. Seuss' message in the story. Students are invited to wear green or dress up like a Who to join in on the fun that day!

Upcoming Events:

December 22nd-Holiday Colors

December 23rd- No School- Start of Winter Break

January 3rd-Classes resume

Reading: This week we are continuing to work on reading aloud by experts. On Monday we used drama to bring our read-alouds to life. We learned we can act out parts of our nonfiction books to learn even more and teach our partners. We will spend the next couple of days making our read aloud the best we can. We will end this unit by creating posters showing what we have learned about a topic we have read about.

Writing: We are working on finishing up another all about book.  We are using all that we know about information books in this last piece and also putting a focus on our spelling and conventions.  Next week we will be adding photographs and images to our writing.  Please help your child find a photograph or image that matches their topic to add to their books.  Feel free to print a picture or find one in magazines.  

Word Work: Our new high frequency words (word wall words) are all, from, they, her, his. We will be assessing these words on Friday.  Some fun ways to practice them are writing them in shaving cream on cookie sheets, writing them in the air, clapping them as you spell them, or tracing over words with different color crayons or markers. We will also be spending time each week work on phonics skills specific to each student’s developmental level.

Math: We are using tends and ones to add such as, 37+5.  Students should count, 38, 39, 40, 41,42.  We are also telling packaging stories and solving them.  An example of a story problem like this would be:

Each box in the bagel shop holds 10 bagels.  There are 6 boxes and 8 extra bagels.  How many bagels are there in the shop?

We will end the week with some more comparing of two digit numbers using the greater than, less than, or equal to sign.  

Content: For the days leading up to break we will be researching and studying how Christmas is celebrated around the world.  We will be studying countries like Germany, Mexico, Italy, England, Sweden, Australia, France, and Israel.  When we return from break we will be beginning our family unit.  

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