First grade news

Dear First grade families,

This week was all about Kindness.  Thank you for sharing with us how kindness has transferred into your home.  Through reading books, art projects, and class discussions, we shared how we can be thoughtful with one another. Thank you to the Abel family for opening the doors of the Watermark factory and showing the class how to plate copper into nickel and gold.  We loved seeing the factory.  It was very cool to be sitting in a board room!

In Reading this week we learned a lot of phonics rules! We learned that “have” is an exception to the magic e rule!  We also learned to pay attention to endings of words such as “ake” with words like make and bake and “ane” with words like plane.

In Math this week we have continued our exploration of two dimensional and three dimensional shapes.  The teachers brought in a mystery bag and we identified all of these three-dimensional shapes that were in the real world.  We continued by having a scavenger hunt and finding all of the 2d and 3d shapes within the classroom. We continued the week by creating paintings and tracing three-dimensional shapes in order to identify which two-dimensional shapes were within them.  For example, a cone has a circle on the side of it.

In Writing, we continued writing our reviews of our collections.  We made sure to use a Opinion Checklist to help us make sure that we are listing more than one reason and that we have evidence that supports our reasoning.  We also practiced disagreeing in our writing. Using sentence starters such as some people may think…or, I can understand why.  We practiced coming up with polite and thoughtful ways to disagree with another person’s opinion.

As a part of our social emotional curriculum we learned about empathy.  We talked about how to share how we are feeling, and how just naming our feeling; excited, mad, sad, angry could make us feel better.  As a class, we also discussed how you can have multiple feelings at once.  Lastly, we read two books by the comedian Michael Ian Black.  The books were called “I’m Sad” and “I’m Worried”.  These two books were about how it’s ok to have these feelings and it gave us some strategies to deal with them.

In Science this week we worked further on reading the thermometer which depends on counting by 2s.  The class counted by 2s all the way to 120!  Students continue to add to their weather vocabulary and identify the meaning of Science Word Wall words such as thermostat, degrees, thermometer, and Fahrenheit.  Each student is making his/her own thermometer by coloring a shoe lace which will be the temperature.

Digraphschversessh