Winter Holidays Around the World
We have been a busy, busy group of firsties this month! We have spent the last two weeks focusing our Reading Workshop time on learning about various winter holidays around the world. We have learned about Christmas, Las Posadas, Hanukkah and St. Lucia. Our friends have not only learned some interesting facts about each holiday but we have been discussing what makes each of these holidays unique and special. Our friends will be finishing up our unit this week by comparing and contrasting two holidays. They will determine what is unique and special about each of the holidays as well as some similarities between the two.
We have also been busy learning new spelling and phonics skills. This week we focused on the L-blends; pl, bl, cl, gl, bl, and sl. We have spent a variety of ways reading, building, writing, and listening to these sounds and producing words with this skill in each.
Our friendly classroom Elf on the Shelf has continued to make his daily appearance in our room. Each day he reminds our friends to be kind to one another, offering an act of kindness to show someone else. We have been doing a variety of kind acts, including giving compliments to another person, cleaning our classroom for the custodian, greeting our cafeteria workers with a smile and happy holidays, etc. Our class rushes in to the room each morning ecstatic to find out where he will be hiding and what his new note will say! Our Elf's acts of kindness and letters have led well into many discussions of respect towards others. Even with the holiday jitters and wiggles, we have been working on remembering that it is important to listen and to follow directions and respect others around us, both students and adults.
This coming week we will be concluding Unit 3 in math, while we continue solving mixed story problems, both addition and subtraction, where the missing number could be at the beginning, middle or end of the story. This is a tough skill to master. We have discussed a lot about how to listen to the words that the story problem gives as clues to what the missing number is and where it will go in our equation. We will continue to work on this skill moving forward. Our friends have enjoyed the opportunity to create their own addition and subtraction problems to ten that the class then had to solve. There are many methods that we can use to help us, and we LOVE to share with the class the methods we like the best. Some enjoy making math mountains, some use circle drawings, some use equations and count on from the bigger number, some even make picture drawings to help them. We have talked about the fact that there is never only one method to use to help solve a problem. If we are having trouble with one method we can always try another to help us solve the problem!
Last week's Lunch and Learn was a huge success! Thank you to all of the moms, dads and grandparents who were able to join your firstie for our Lunch and Learn event! Our class was so excited to eat lunch with their grown up and take them back to the room to read with them. We are hoping to have an even greater turn out at our second event! We would love your feedback on the event. Click here to fill out a brief survey and let us know your thoughts! We were able to share our classroom reading strategies and give each adult time to practice those strategies with their child, how fun!! Take a look at our focused readers below.
I would like to send out a giant THANK YOU to all of our Mystery Readers this month! We have had moms, dads, grandmas and aunts come to visit us throughout the month. It has been so fun to see the students guessing who the next mystery reader will be. They have all been loving the stories we have heard. Some of our favorites included A Year Without Santa, Catch That Cookie and There Was An Old Lady Who Swallowed Some Bells. You can see all of our mystery readers below!
Our Christmas party will be on Wednesday this week. We will be having fun with the Polar Express! Please remember to send in your party snack/item if you are on the schedule for this holiday. Reminder notes were sent home today. Please let me know by Tuesday afternoon if you are unable to send your item in so that arrangements can be made! You can visit our holiday snack schedule here.
Don't forget to send in your child's book on Tuesday for our First Grade Book Exchange! Remember, it should only be up to $3, should be wrapped and needs to have a tag with your child's name on it so that the new owner will know who it came from!
CELEBRATING OUR SUCCESS!!!!!!!!!!
I would like to end with some celebrations. This week, our last friend passed their Basketball words! YAY!!!! This means that all 24 first graders have successfully mastered the first 3 ball word lists! We were so excited to celebrate this big achievement with some time playing ball int the gym. Our class was ecstatic to be able to break away from our normal routine and have some free time at home to play ball! Keep up the practice at home. Your hard work with your children pays off and we can see it at school!
