Last week, 1-Bu celebrated World Kindness Day! On Tuesday, we created 60 kindness pins and handed them out to people at school. Check the pictures at the bottom of this post for some examples of pins that the students made. Throughout the week, we also shared examples of small acts of kindness that we had done to help others.
Even though the snow on Thursday created a traffic nightmare, 1-Bu enjoyed checking out the first snowflakes of the season. We went outside with pieces of black construction paper (to catch the snowflakes) and magnifying glasses (to take an up close look at them). Even though the conditions weren't right to see perfectly forms snowflakes while we were outside, we made sure to search Google for other peoples' pictures of snowflakes under magnification when we came in. The students also made sure to taste the snowflakes, too.
Here's what we've been working on in the classroom :
Reading : We focused on fluency last week. In 1-Bu, we say that reading with fluency means reading like a storyteller. To read fluently, we discussed that you have to pay attention to the 3 Ps - pace, personality, and punctuation. In regards to pace, you can't read too fast or too slow, but somewhere in the middle that's just right. For personality, you have to make sure that you give different characters different voices. Last, we always make sure we're paying attention to punctuation, and changing our voice for exclamation marks and question marks. (We didn't quite get to the third P, punctuation, last week. We'll be doing it this week.)
Writing : The students have been doing a great job adding details to their writing pieces during our Small Moments Writing Unit. This unit has focused on writing about small moments in time so that the students learn about how to include details in their writing pieces. The students learned about adding details like names, numbers, colors, the setting, the size of something, and characters' feelings.
Phonics : I haven't given you a phonics update in a while! Over the past few weeks, we have spent a lot of time going over digraphs and bonus letters. The students have done a nice job incorporating their phonics knowledge into their reading (decoding) and spelling (encoding). Ask your child to tell you about digraphs (wh, sh, th, ch, ck) and bonus letters (f, l, s). Also, if you're feeling brave, ask your child when you know to use ck and when you know to use a bonus letter. (Answer : at the end of a word, after a short vowel)
Math : In unit 3, the students have been spending a lot of time focusing on adding and subtracting. First, we went over a new diagram, called 'Part, Part, Total,' which may help the students solve some number stories. Then, we spent a few days coming up with different strategies people use to solve number stories. After that, we began to take a deeper look at number lines and number grids. The students practiced skip counting on them and learned how to use them as a tool to help them solve various kinds of addition and subtraction problems. We'll continue taking a deeper look into them this week.
Computers : After focusing on trackpad skills for a few weeks, we have turned our focus to learning about Google Drawings. The students used various tools in Google Drawings to create an image to represent a math word problem.
Here are some pictures of the students' World Kindness Day pins and checking out the first snowflakes of the school year :