Strategies and Sound

It's been another busy week in first grade!

We added another rotation to Daily 5- Read to Someone. This is a time where we can practice our reading fluency (reading smoothly, with expression and accuracy) with a reading partner. We are using poetry to help us with reading with fluency.

We added two new strategies to our fix-up strategies. We can get our mouth ready by saying the first sound in the word we don't know and think about what makes sense. We then check our word by looking at the picture and the rest of the unknown word to make sure they match. We can also ask ourselves, "Do my letters match my sounds?" as we monitor our reading. This strategy is usually used alongside using the picture and getting our mouth ready. In this strategy we may use a word that would make sense with the picture and may even sound right- but the sounds we say might not match the letters in the word. An example would be when we read, "The lioness carries her cub to the den," but the text says "The lioness carries her baby to the den." What we read makes sense but the sounds in cub do not match the letters in the text. We will add more tools to our toolbox next week!

In Writers' Workshop we began our new unit on writing Small Moment stories. Small Moment stories are about ur own lives. We got booklets. 3 pages long! We had stamina as we added details to our writing to make it interesting for our readers.

In Math we continued to work on solving subtraction problems. We solved take away problems, comparing problems, and missing number problems. We also looked at the relationship between addition and subtraction.

We were scientists and explored sound.we learned about sound waves, vibrations, and pitch. We made some excellent sound machines this week.

We also started setting up our blog on KidBlog. We picked our avatars. We also practiced writing our first blog post. Right now, our blog is only viewable by students in our classroom. As we get more comfortable posting, we will make our blog more public. We discussed digital citizenship issues as we blog- not using our full name (only our first names), not attaching our picture to our name, and keeping our personal information private. Blogging will give us the opportunity to practice digital citizenship with a real audience. Be on the lookout for directions on how to join our blog as a parent in Thursday folders!