The students and I are very excited about our current Gingerbread House project. Please make sure to return the permission slips and $3 by Wednesday, December 12th so that your child may participate.
Last week was the Hour of Code, which is a nationwide event that takes place the first week of December. Its goal is to introduce students to computer science. Every day this week, 1-Bu participated in a coding activity. They did an 'unplugged' coding activity with Mrs. DelPriore on Monday, learned about coding on the computer with Mrs. Cardia and myself on Tuesday, practiced different 'plugged in' coding activities on Wednesday and Thursday, and then rounded out the week with a coding challenge with Mrs. Miele and myself on Friday. The students really enjoyed coding. In school, we used code.org and tynker.com for some fun coding activities. Have you child try it out at home!
Here's what else we were working on in the classroom :
Reading : We wrapped up our work on predictions last week by learning how to make predictions while you read. We spoke about how our minds often try to think of what's going to happen in the book without us even realizing it, but that it's important to stop reading and listen to our mind every once in a while to make a prediction. Once we realize what our mind is doing, we can make our prediction even better by thinking about it on purpose! We also spent a few days working with our reading partners to talk about and grow our predictions.
After working on predictions, we spent a couple of days on summarizing books. This is the beginning of our work on reading comprehension that will carry us through for the rest of the year. While we focused a lot on reading strategies at the beginning of the year (and will continue to do so), being able to understand what you read is the true heart of reading. Next week we'll dive into more elaborate retelling techniques, but last week we just talked about quick summaries of books by telling about the beginning, middle, and end.
Writing : The students published their small moment writing pieces last week and we moved right on to our next unit, which is 'how to' writing. In this unit, the students will write nonfiction pieces that are aimed at teaching others how to do various things. So far, we've learned a little bit about the genre and started our first how to books, which are all 'how to make a gingerbread house.' You'll get to see your child's completed book during (or after) the gingerbread house making session on Wednesday.
Math : We started our measurement unit in math last week. So far, we have practiced measuring using nonstandard units of length. This week, we'll do a little bit more measuring of length and then we'll move on to collecting and representing data using bar graphs.
Here are some pictures of 1-Bu over the past couple of weeks :