A Peek in Our Classroom

        We have been very busy first graders in room 107. First, I want to thank all of the parents who came out for Open House and Math Night. It was so nice to meet everyone. I also want to thank everyone who completed the parent survey. I gained so much insight into your children and I am excited to help them reach the goals that you have for them this year.

      We just wrapped up our first domain on Fables and Stories. We read a variety of stories that taught us important lessons. Each time we read a story we discussed the characters, the moral, and if the story had personification. 

     Our class did an amazing job on our first math test of the year. We have moved onto learning about number bonds. I am so impressed with how our class is doing. Our kindergarten teachers did such a great job preparing our students for first grade math. We are going to be spending about another week on number bonds before we move onto addition to 10. 

   As part of Daily Five we are working on developing good reading strategies. We have been focusing on checking for understanding to help our comprehension and blending/stretching our words to help with accuracy.

Reminders:

• Picture Day Thursday, October 15th 
• Q-Tip Skeletons Friday, October 23rd 

No Place For Hate

Tomorrow our school will be kicking off our No Place for Hate initiative. We will be having an Omegaman assembly at school and we will be talking about what No Place for Hate stands for. You will be receiving a yellow pamphlet in your child's folder for you to read and sign. Please send these back as soon as possible.

Our Schedule

Our Schedule

Day 1 - Music

Day 2 - P.E.

Day 3 - Music

Day 4 - P.E.

Day 5 - Art and Library

Lunch and Recess - 12:30-1:15

Please remember that students need to wear sneakers on P.E. days. Students also need art smocks, if you have not sent in a smock please do so as soon as possible. 

Our First Week

Wow! What a great first week of school. I really enjoyed our first 3 days together. I am so impressed with my new first graders. We have been getting to know each other and our classroom routines. I must say that they all were very quick in learning procedures. 

Last week we read many stories about the first day of school and being a good friend. One story that we read is called Have You Filled a Bucket Today? In this book we learn that everyone walks around with an invisible bucket and that we can fill each others buckets by doing and saying kind things. We have decided to be a classroom full of bucketfillers, not bucket dippers. Bucket dippers are bullies and other people who are not kind. You can learn more about the book HERE.

Last week we also began learning about Daily Five and Math Daily 3. Daily Five is the structure that I use to organize our literacy block. In our classroom we do not do centers, instead we work on five meaningful literacy tasks that we self-selcet as the teacher works with small groups of students on one-on-one with a child. The tasks are Read to Self, Work on Writing, Read to Someone, Word Work, and Listening to Reading. Each choice is explicitly taught and modeled with the class and then we practice and build stamina. New choices are not added until we are able to work for at least 10 minutes independently at our choice. Math Daily 3 consists of the same structure, but it has different choices. These are Math by Myself, Math with Someone, and Math Writing. I am going to be sharing more about these at open house. 

This coming week we will continue to build our stamina during Read to Self and Math by Myself. We will also dive into our writing program and learn about where writer's get ideas from. Please contact me at any time if you have any questions or concerns.

Welcome!

I am so excited about beginning another school year at Circlevillle Elementary. This year marks my 14th year teaching. I have been very busy this past week getting our classroom ready for my 19 new first graders. Below you will find some pictures of our classroom. A full classroom tour will be coming soon.

The before picture

The after picture

January and February Recap

It has been a while since I have posted, but that doesn't mean we haven't been hard at work in first grade. We have been learning about penguins, the history of our Earth, and dinosaurs in between all of our snow days and delays. Let's think spring! Keep reading to see photos of some of our wonderful work.

First up we learned about penguins. We read a variety of non-fiction penguin texts to collect research. We collected facts on our penguin schema chart. Then we used the information to write penguin reports. They are located under our cute penguin pictures. We worked together to write about what penguins eat, how they move, what they are like as babies, and their enemies. We also wrote a class paragraph on penguins.

During our study of the history of the Earth, we had the chance to learn about dinosaurs. We were very excited about this, many students even brought in dinosaurs and wore dinosaur shirts. We read books about dinosaurs, watched a video clip of a real paleontologist that works at the American Museum of Natural History and we worked in small groups to write about some our our favorite dinosaurs.

 I want to give a big THANK YOU for all of my Valentine's that I recieved. I feel quite spoiled.

If the weather cooperates we will be celebrating our 100th day of school on Friday. I can't believe we are more than half way through the year.