First Grade Fun

Welcome First Grade families! We are SO excited to have you all join us on this first grade journey!!! Our friends have been hard at work these last couple of weeks learning a lot of new rules and procedures to help us create a successful year in First Grade!!! Our class has spent a lot of time learning how to be STAR classroom and school citizens. As you have seen, we are a PBIS school, which means we have implemented a school wide behavior system that focuses on our students POSITIVE behavior. We are Forest View Stars and work hard every day to be Safe, Trustworthy, Accountable and Respectful.

I was so happy when I returned to school on Tuesday and the class was able to tell how to be STAR students throughout the school. As a class we came up with a class contract, stating the behavior we should display at school. After creating the contract together, everyone signed it. This was their way of agreeing to follow our contract and showing that they know and understand our expectations!

Every day we learn a little more about all of the fun we will have in learning new, and increasingly complex, skills this year. We have already found out that we will become authors this year and are super excited to explore this idea more. We have also been working on being independent workers this week. We are learning that during work time it is time to focus and work independently, which is something we have been working hard at every day. Independent workers are respectful of their friends, work on their own and work the whole time. We listen to a lot of calm, instrumental music during work time which helps to remind us to stay calm, leave our friends alone and work on our own. Check our some of our independent work time below!!

This week we have been really focusing on Daily 5 stations. We have learned about STAMINA and in order to build our stamina we keep our eyes on our own work, work the whole time and stay in one spot. It is important that we work on this a little more each day as we will have opportunities often to work in independent stations to practice the skills we learn together. We have learned how to Read to Self. Our goal is to read for up to 20 minutes. So far this week we have been able to build up to following all Read to Self rules for 14 minutes. We know with hard work and focus we can reach our goal!! You can see us practicing here:

In addition to Read to Self, we have learned most of our remaining literacy stations as well. We have learned and practiced all expectations for listening to reading on ipads, work on writing and word work. We have even practiced rotating through multiple stations. Thursday we began practicing and building stamina at Read to Someone. We made it 5 minutes out of our 20 minute goal, which is pretty good for the first attempt! It is important for us to remember that daily 5 stations, although fun, are our time to practice the skills we are learning and therefore it is important to stay on task the whole time!

Our class is enjoying station time and being able to roam the room to find comfy places to learn. These boys are focused on reading and listening to stories on epic! Be on the lookout next week for information about how to access epic! from home!

Addyson and Ricky have enjoyed getting to write letters to friends this week. Ricky has been hard at work writing letters to his friend next door!

Stella and Tylor are having fun building and writing stories. All of our friends enjoy the opportunity to cut and glue pictures to go with the stories they are able to create!

During math the last couple of weeks our our firsties have been working on reviewing, visualizing and decomposing numbers 1-10. This week we have begun our first math unit. During this unit we will focus on adding and subtracting within 10. We will learn and practice a variety of strategies to help build these skills. As we begin working on increasingly complex skills, we will also continue to practice basic math skills and facts to help build our math fluency. Some ways we like to do this are with fun videos where we can sing and exercise along with our math practice. You can see some of the fun videos below.

Moving forward:

*Thank you to everyone who took the time to fill our our brief school climate survey! If you still have your survey, please fill it out and send it back on Monday. The more data we have collected the better we can work to improve our climate!

*Candy Bar sales began this week. If you are interested in selling candy bars this fall please send in a note! This is a great fundraiser for our school! Every penny earned helps!

*Next week is homecoming which means:

~ Monday - bring your favorite stuffed animal to work day (must be small enough to fit in your hand). Monday is also LATE START MONDAY!

~ Tuesday - comfy day

~ Wednesday - sports day

~ Thursday - hat day

~ Friday - STAR shirt day as well as early dismissal (2:40) for homecoming!

~ Make sure to come out for the homecoming fun! Forest View will have a roped off area across from the skate park. Enjoy the parade and head on over for the game!!!

*Please refer to the FAQ page on our class website here to find many answers to questions you may have.

*Important upcoming dates will be updated on our class website home page frequently. You can view them here. You can also visit our district website to learn more about important dates and district information.

*I am excited to get to meet all of you at conferences next month. We will be scheduling those next week for Thursday, October 11th. I am looking forward to sharing your child's learning, success and areas of growth with you then!

*Please feel free to email me with any questions or concerns you may have - marni.quist@cadillac.k12.mi.us - I check my emails regularly and will respond within a day to your email. You may also call our class phone and I will return your call as soon as I can. The phone is set to go straight to voicemail during school hours to minimize distractions, therefore email is the best way to get ahold of me.

**I can't wait to continue sharing your child's learning experience with you throughotu the year! I generally send out new blog posts on Fridays (as a general rule, however this can vary from time to time). This will be a great way to stay connected and see your child's learning up close!