As of Monday, we are officially halfway through the school year. The students have worked so hard and have made so much progress since September. I am so incredibly proud of them, and you should be too! We'll celebrate Halfway Day on Monday by rotating through the first grade classrooms and doing different activities, based on halves, with each first grade teacher.
Here's what we were working on in the classroom last week :
Reading : We expanded on our knowledge of using our schema to make connections by learning all about text-to-text connections. A text-to-text connection is when you are reading one text and it reminds you of something that happened in another text. We had some great discussions in the classroom, connecting various read alouds that we have read throughout the school year. We've been using post-its to keep track of the connections we make while we read.
During a read aloud last week, we also, accidentally, came across another kind of connection : text-to-world connections. We'll be looking into this connection more in-depth this week. These are the toughest kind of connections for first graders to make because they don't tend to have a lot of schema about the world around them (i.e. historical and current events), so don't expect your child to have many.
Writing : We published our how to books last week! To celebrate the completion of our unit, the students read their published pieces to small groups of their classmates. Then, the students followed the steps to a book about making collages, which we had been using as a mentor text throughout this unit. They LOVED creating the collages. Look for pictures at the bottom of this post and have your child tell you which collage he/she created.
Once we published our pieces, we took a few days to reorganize in between writing units. We wrote a small moment piece to remind ourselves about using details to tell a story across pages and then learned a little bit about opinion writing, and the students wrote a piece about their favorite food and why it was their favorite. We'll kick off our next writing unit next week (called Writing for Readers), which is focused on writing conventions (i.e. sounding out words, using capital letter, neat handwriting).
Math : We continued investigating place value, number comparisons (greater than, less than, and equal to), and number stories last week. We also used our growing knowledge of base ten blocks to help us add two- and three-digit numbers.
Phonics : Continuing on in our study of long vowels, we went over the long o last week. The students are really starting to get a hang of various long vowel patterns.
Valentine Project : This project is due next Monday, February 11th. Your child should be doing all of the tracing, cutting, and writing him/herself. Please work with your child to help manage his/her time.
Here are some pictures of the students in the classroom this week:
Here's what we were working on in the classroom last week :
Reading : We expanded on our knowledge of using our schema to make connections by learning all about text-to-text connections. A text-to-text connection is when you are reading one text and it reminds you of something that happened in another text. We had some great discussions in the classroom, connecting various read alouds that we have read throughout the school year. We've been using post-its to keep track of the connections we make while we read.
During a read aloud last week, we also, accidentally, came across another kind of connection : text-to-world connections. We'll be looking into this connection more in-depth this week. These are the toughest kind of connections for first graders to make because they don't tend to have a lot of schema about the world around them (i.e. historical and current events), so don't expect your child to have many.
Writing : We published our how to books last week! To celebrate the completion of our unit, the students read their published pieces to small groups of their classmates. Then, the students followed the steps to a book about making collages, which we had been using as a mentor text throughout this unit. They LOVED creating the collages. Look for pictures at the bottom of this post and have your child tell you which collage he/she created.
Once we published our pieces, we took a few days to reorganize in between writing units. We wrote a small moment piece to remind ourselves about using details to tell a story across pages and then learned a little bit about opinion writing, and the students wrote a piece about their favorite food and why it was their favorite. We'll kick off our next writing unit next week (called Writing for Readers), which is focused on writing conventions (i.e. sounding out words, using capital letter, neat handwriting).
Math : We continued investigating place value, number comparisons (greater than, less than, and equal to), and number stories last week. We also used our growing knowledge of base ten blocks to help us add two- and three-digit numbers.
Phonics : Continuing on in our study of long vowels, we went over the long o last week. The students are really starting to get a hang of various long vowel patterns.
Valentine Project : This project is due next Monday, February 11th. Your child should be doing all of the tracing, cutting, and writing him/herself. Please work with your child to help manage his/her time.
Here are some pictures of the students in the classroom this week:
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