Another Wonderful Week!

Halloween, a Royals' win, a big parade and a day off from school was quite the start to the week! There was so much excitement in first grade!

We continued to focus on making connections as we read this week. We read the book My Best Friend and discussed the connections we made to the main character Lily. The connections we made helped us understand how Lily was feeling in the book. It also lead to some great conversations about how real friends treat one another.

In Writers' Workshop, we continued to write small moment stories. We focused on how to give the readers a sense of closure instead of just ending the story with "The End." We also posted our Orange Pumpkin books to our classroom blog. Thank you parents who commented on the students' posts. They really enjoy seeing your messages.

In Math, we focused on strategies to add to 20. We reviewed our doubles facts and discovered that all of the sums are even numbers! We also reviewed our doubles plus one facts. We added a new strategy- doubles plus two. In this strategy we can either double the small number and add two more or we can double the number that comes between our two numbers. Example: 5 +7 can be thought of as 5 +5=10 and then add two more to get 12 or you can double 6 to get twelve. We also practiced solving two step story problems.

In Social Studies, we learned about Veteran's Day. We wrote letters that will be given out to our Veterans at the assembly on Wednesday. Please remember to send in the form if you will have a Veteran guest of honor joining us on Wednesday. If you need another form your student may pick those up on Monday from Mrs. Sheets. We also have stars that you may decorate with your family for Veterans who will not be able to attend.

Thursday, November 12th is picture retake day!

Halloween Week!

We have had such a fun week in first grade!

In Readers' Workshop we focused on making text to self connections. We read several Kevin Henkes' books and then made connections between the story and our lives. We learned that we can connect to the story elements (characters, setting, problem, and solution) and to how characters feel. These connections help us to comprehend the story we are reading.

In Writers' Workshop we focused on using adjectives to help us describe. We wrote our own spooky versions of Brown Bear, Brown Bear with things we find at Halloween time. We then published those stories using  https://www.littlebirdtales.com/. We will post these stories on our blogs next week, but here are a couple to enjoy before they are all posted. I will send a text via Remind when we have posted them to KidBlog.

https://www.littlebirdtales.com/tales/view/story_id/551436

https://www.littlebirdtales.com/tales/view/story_id/551253

In Math, we wrapped up our unit on Addition and Subtraction to 12. We focused on the relationship between addition and subtraction (if we know the addition fact, we already know the related subtraction fact). We also used the Draw a Picture strategy to help us solve story problems. We will begin our unit on Addition Strategies to 20 on Monday!

We focused on Bats for our Wonder Wednesday/Science this week. We used PebbleGo to research facts about bats. We took notes about what we learned about bats from PebbleGo and other resources. We then determined what was the most important information and shared with the class on Google Classroom.

Our Halloween party on Friday afternoon was awesome! Thank you parents for all your hard work! I will share pictures from the party soon!