This week in First grade...

September 24th-28th 

This week is Education Go Get it Week!  We will explore higher education, beyond high school, and careers!  Please refer to the blue half sheet note that came home last Tuesday for the theme of the day.  I've also included a schedule for theme days on the left side bar. 

Writing Workshop

This week in Writing Workshop, we will talk about how authors write stories that have a beginning, middle and end.  We will practice this by learning how to tell our stories on 3 fingers.  We will also look at different picture books, and talk about how the author wrote their story across several pages.  We will work on writing a story across 3 pages to show the beginning, middle and end.  We will also discuss the revising and editing portions of the writing process.  Revising is when we reread our story and decide what we need to "fix".  Sometimes, we might add words to our story, and other times, we might take out some words.  Editing is when we reread our story again to make sure all of our sentences begin with capital letters and end with a punctuation mark.  This is also the time that we will find all word wall words and make sure they are spelled correctly.  

Reading Workshop

Reading is thinking, and this week we will learn how to be active readers by making thoughtful connections to the text.  Making connections will help us to understand the text better, enable us to predict based on what we know, and make inferences.  Making connections is more than just, “This book reminds me of…”  It is about understanding the story and the characters better.  We will learn how to make connection between the text and ourselves, text to another text, and text to the world.  These are comprehension strategies that we will continue to work on throughout the year.

Science:

Wow, Last week’s unit on National Symbols was a huge hit! The children had a great time learning as they crafted symbols and wrote important facts about each one.  Our hallway is filled with fantastic facts and artwork.  I hope you will take the time to look next week or during your conference time.  Now it is time to get back to the business of studying matter and energy. As we focus our attention on using what we have learned about the properties of matter, combined with what we will be learning about mass, the students will be investigators who solve a mystery. Be sure to ask them what questions scientist‘s ask!

Math:

This week we will start our addition/subtraction unit.  This unit will last for several weeks.  The children will practice and demonstrate their ability to subitize, or instantly recognize sets of objects (such as dots) in patterned arrangements and to tell how many without counting. They will continue to develop their conceptual understanding of the relationships between the numbers 1-10 and the anchor numbers of 5 and 10 and will use five-frames and ten-frames in problem solving. They will count on and back one from any number, from 4 to 5, and will connect this with the concepts of “more than” and “less than.”

The children will continue to develop their ability to conceptualize a number as being made up of two or more parts and their understanding of the part-part-whole model and related number relationships. They will also continue to explore in this unit and throughout the year, a variety of addition/subtraction problem solving situations.