Spelling: Spelling groups will start receiving their sorts starting next week (one group per day). This means you may not see spelling homework come home until Friday. The day students receive their homework, they will write so in their assignment notebook (so that you know when they should have brought it home). That day they will also write in their assignment notebook when their spelling homework is due. This is done when their group meets with me. Therefore, please refer to it when addressing spelling due dates.
Students will be focusing on a variety of spelling patterns in their different groups:
- Long vowel patterns
- Inflected Endings
- Short vowels
- Other vowel patterns
- Consonant digraphs
Depending on what is needed, the focus may change or we might spend a longer time on certain patterns. This flexibility allows students to get the support they need where they need it! It’s just one reason I love the program.
Writing: Our focus has shifted to narrative writing, but we are also taking a look at grammar. This week, we explored the definition for nouns: person/animal, place, or thing. Students each drew a picture of a place and then considered what kind of people/animals and things would be there. They labeled each noun that showed up in their drawing. This drawing will be a perfect connection to creating a story – they already have a setting with characters. It will be fun to see what kind of twists, turns, adventures or problems students imagine happening in the scene they’ve created.
*New Unit* – Prairie Crossing Over Time (or as I refer to it with our students: “PCCS Time Travel”) is our next unit! Students were entertainingly shocked by the photos we viewed from Google Earth of our school’s campus over the years (see below)!
The class will be discovering how our area has changed over time in several important ways, including:
- human population
- suburb development
- environmental restoration
They will learn how lifestyles have changed over the past 300 years and practice the following:
- Generate questions about individuals and groups who have shaped a significant historical change
- Compare perspectives of people in the past to those of people in the present
- Compare different accounts of the same historical event
Next Friday, students will take a walking tour with Ms. Naomi to hear more about our campus and how specific areas look the same or different from the past.
Green Challenge: In January, we save paper!
Here are the ideas our first graders came up with for how we can work on using less paper:
-If you don’t like something you made, fold it into something new
-Paperless homework (Spelling on computer? Parent signature in assignment notebook? Stay tuned! 🙂 )
-Use both sides
-Don’t waste space on the paper
-Daily 5: Finish a book before getting new paper
-Unused book pages can be cut and used for a new book
-Write more than one story/chapter in a book
-Make sure to recycle
-Use scrap paper!
Let’s collect scrap paper this month!
Can we reuse Hawk Tickets?
We plan on counting total paper used by our class in 1 week. We’ve made predictions on how many pages we think our class will use in one week. Here are the student’s guesses:
10, 24, 300, 25, 70, 700, 1 million, 900, 1000, 400, 500, 20, 700, 1200, 10, 600, 1, 50, 250, 99, 0, 200, 100, 34
Once we get our results, we will set a goal for the following week to try to use less. Wish us luck!
Other information:
To check in about nouns, see if your student can point out nouns in a room of the house after naming the different types (person/animal, place, or thing!).
Yesterday we traveled to Prairie Smoke Pond and will continue to do so throughout the winter weather. Although we have sit-upons available, please make sure students are prepared for the outdoors with boots, snow pants, and warm layers each day. It is also important they have a change of clothes appropriate for the colder weather in case it is needed. With safety as a priority for our school, continue to encourage safe behavior and listening the first time to directions when outside. We appreciate your partnership in this!
Girl Scouts are collecting box tops! If you have any to contribute to our class, please send them with your student to add to our envelope.
Enjoy the weekend and stay warm.
Mrs. Buesking