Week 8

Here are some highlights from the week...

Out first week of "Walk to Word Study" was a success! The kiddos have impressed me with their smooth transitions and focus during that time. Check in with your first grader about the spelling patterns that they are studying!

When we get to tricky words in our JUST RIGHT books, we work to solve them! Sometimes we can have some bad habits when solving words, but when we know what they are, we can drop them and pick up good habits instead! We focused on dropping those bad reading habits and picking up good habits.

Some bad reading habits that we want to drop are:

• The Freeze
• The Tell Me
• The Mumble

When we come to a tricky word, sometimes we freeze up, we ask someone to tell us what it is, mumble through the word, or we just guess. Instead we want to pick up good habits.

Some good reading habits that we want to pick up are:

• Check the picture
• Look at ALL the parts of a word
• Flip the sound

When you are reading at home, make sure that your first grader is dropping those bad habits and practicing those good habits!

We spent this week cleaning up our writing! The first graders went through their small moment writing portfolios and edited their writing. They worked hard to make their words easy to read (handwriting and spacing) and also focused on capitals and punctuation. We color coded our writing by making the first capital letter of each sentence, green for "go" and the punctuation at the end, red for "stop." You can use this color code at home as a way to build these writing habits and encourage writing that matches the way it should be read!

In math, we focused on the power of the equal sign. This work with the equal sign allows students to construct true number sentences such as 4 + 3 = 5 + 2 without misunderstanding the equal sign to mean that the numbers are the same. Students understand that when added together, two numbers make the same total, regardless of whether one of the numbers appears first or second in equations and expressions. I was blown away by their understanding and application of this concept! At home, you can have fill in the blank number sentences for your first grader to complete (ex. 3+ 5 = __ + 7).

On Friday, we did a Mystery Science mini lesson and activity. Students learned about a variety of apples. In the activity, Apple Trapper, students engaged in the engineering design process and built an invention that can pick up apples in the classroom. Students explored the properties of paper and thought like inventors - building, testing, learning from failure, and trying again and again!

You can try it at home....https://mysteryscience.com/trending/mystery-17/traits-selection/420?t=student

We ended the week with the Missoula performance of The Tortoise and the Hare. Amazing job to our first grade performers!

Reminders:
October 21: RFTA Collection of Funds DUE TODAY
October 25: Fall Fun Night, 6:00pm-8:00pm

Here are some photos from the week..