Week 1 FUN!

We cannot believe that our first week in FIRST GRADE is already over! We have been exercising our brains so much this week! This week we focused on building a classroom community. We discussed classroom rules and routines and together created a classroom agreement on things that we all need to do to help everyone learn and to have a fun, exciting and fantastic school year! After creating our agreement, each student signed their name, committing to help maintain our classroom community.

Throughout the week, we read a variety of books about our first day in first grade as well as books about building a community in our classroom. Below are a few of the fun books we read.

the crayon box that talked

first grade stinks

first day jitters

We spent a lot of time getting to know our friends this week. Some of the students in our class we knew from last year, but not everyone. We had a lot of fun learning new things about all of our friends. We even played some games with Mrs. Powell's class next door to help us get to know them a little bit better also!

This week we began learning about Daily 5. This is a time during our day where teachers work with small groups on guided reading while other students are reading independently or to others, working on writing, listening to reading or word work. This week we have focused on one of its components; Read to Self. Reading to self is an extremely important and valuable skill and we have been building our stamina all week! Our goal is to be able to read to self (sitting in one quiet spot, reading the whole time, and reading good fit books) for 20 minutes at a time. This week we were able to get all the way up to 7 minutes! We will keep practicing and building our stamina so that we can be independent readers! As a group, we also discussed the 3 ways to read a book, which include reading the pictures, reading the words, and retelling the story. These are all important skills to have and all help us become better readers!

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Our class also spent a lot of time this week working on various writing projects. We worked on writing about what first grade is, as well as creating books about our First Week in First Grade! We wrote about the teacher, our friends, our lunch, what we learned already and what we liked the best! Throughout the week we refreshed our memories about some very important details to include in our sentences; such as capital letters at the beginning of our sentences and punctuation marks at the end!

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To wrap up our week we spent our Friday afternoon completing our study about Goldilocks and the Three Bears with an exciting STEM activity. On Tuesday we read the story Goldilocks and the Three Bears and discussed various text features. On Wednesday, we were introduced to a fun activity where we were able to change the ending to our story. Rather than Goldilocks running away from the three bears, we decided we would help the bears build a bed for Goldilocks. This took a lot of planning so we set off drawing a few ideas of what we would want the beds for Goldilocks to look like. We made sure to add quite a bit of detail in our pictures. On Thursday, we took a deeper look at our plans and discussed the specific materials that we thought we might need in order to carry out our plan. We made sure to write our lists (sounding out our words) and then revised our plan and drew our final picture to model how we were going to build the beds. We also made sure to label our drawings to make it easier to build later on. Finally, on Friday, we took out our plans and were able to use the materials that were brought in and donated to us in order to build beds sturdy enough for Goldilocks to sleep on. It was a very exciting and engaging learning activity. Thank you to all of our families who donated art supplies - we could not have done it with all of your help!

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We have been exercising our brains a lot this week throughout all of our fun learning experiences. Sometimes it can be exhausting and taxing on our brains so we make sure to take frequent brain breaks to give our minds a rest and to get our bodies moving! We use GoNoodle a lot in our classroom for fun and engaging music/movement activities to get our blood pumping. Our friends already have some favorites they like to have played! Snack time has also been a great time for all of us to have a little down time. This is something that is very different in first grade than kindergarten - no more rest time! We make sure to relax and recharge each day during snack time so that we can continue learning throughout our day!

As you can see we have had an extremely fun, exciting, engaging and busy first week back to school. There has been so much happening and I am sure that your Firsties have been very excited to share all of their fun experiences with you! Enjoy your weekend, recharge your batteries and we will see everyone again next week!!!

Please contact me with any questions you may have!

~ Mrs. Quist