Week 17- Welcome Back!

Upcoming Dates and Reminders-

January 11, Monday- Gym🏃🏾‍♂️
January 12, Tuesday- Library, Art 🎨
January 13, Wednesday- STEAM 🔬
January 14, Thursday- Music 🎶
January 15, Friday- Early Release, Gym 🏃🏾‍♂️

📚Baggie Books– starting next week I will add a reading log and retell cards to baggie books. If you could help your child fill this out and indicate if the book was just right or too hard, this will help me as I assess students and help with accountability.

🗂Report Cards– the official end of Semester 1 is Friday, the 15th. I’ll be finalizing report cards and they will be sent home Friday, January 22. Unfortunately, we won’t meet together until March for Parent-Teacher Conferences. I will do my best to be as thorough as possible and give explanations. Please know that we will continue to use the 1, 2, 3 scoring (while 3* is on the report card as advanced, we do not use this score). 2’s are totally acceptable and mean your child is growing on their way to where s/he needs to be by the end of the year.

❤️ Valentine’s Day- This year we are going to write and hand-make Valentines at school for everyone in our class! 😃 We will design and write the message. You won’t need to do anything from home. (If you already bought some you are welcome to send them but know you don’t need to. I’ll send a class list soon.) If you have any cute stickers or other crafty decorations your child may want to use to decorate, please feel free to send those in.

Scholastic Book Orders

Paper flyers will be sent home next week. Otherwise, you can check the digital ones before that. I will place orders on January 29th. There is still an option to have it shipped to your house. As soon as you create/pay your “send to my house order” it will finalize and ship to you. Otherwise, it should arrive at school in early February.

Connect to Our Class Page: https://orders.scholastic.com/QQJNN
Class Code: QQJNN
Shop the flyers with your child
Class Order Due Date: 1/29/2021

Mystery Reader-

This week Jack’s mom, Mrs. Hoekstra was our Mystery Reader, she read us Pete the Cat’s World Tour. Sign up for a “Virtual Mystery Reader” slot by clicking this link.

Celebrations-

Star of the Day – Four friends were Star of the Day this week- Ryan, Xander, Connor, and Jack. They helped lead us in the pledge and enjoyed lunch with Mrs. Cooley on Friday.

Quote of the Week – This week’s quote went to Jack! He always perseveres and is willing to go back and make it better!

First Grade Family Time – At the assembly, we celebrated our learning, gave awards for the quote of the week, along with awards for lost teeth, shoe-tying, & birthdays from the week. Here are our “award-winning” first-graders from today’s family time.

: Cambry learned how to tie her shoes!

: Connor, Abbey, Ella, and Hazel all lost teeth this week and joined the club!

: Xander, Connor, and Palmer turned 7 over break! Carmel turned 6 and 1/2.

OUR LEARNING:

Writing – It was another week of nonfiction writing. We began writing another nonfiction book- All About School. We practiced teaching with pictures as well as words, spelling domain-specific words, and using readers to point out parts of our stories that don’t make sense.

Word Study – For word study, we examined common word endings to make sure we read all the parts of words. We practiced hunting for blends and chunks at the ends of words (such as ing, ink, est). When we know these word parts well, we can read and write bigger, multisyllabic words!

Reading– This week we continued to work on making good habits for when we read hard words. We practiced crashing small word parts we knew together to make the whole word, doing a slow check to check all the sounds, and checking if the words looked right, sounded right, and made sense. We didn’t let hard words get in our way!

Math- We are wrapping up unit 3 which has been all about story problems! We took our last quiz (sent home today) and spent the remainder of the week reviewing for our test next week. (It will be Wednesday and Thursday.) This can be a tricky unit for kids due to increased reading and figuring out what the numbers represent (partner or the total). We will continue to practice and build on these skills! Using a math mountain as a visual for students to solve these problems is extremely helpful for them.

Social-Emotional– This week we picked back up with Little Penguin- Emotions and the Brain. We are continuing to learn about self-management of our own emotions. We learned about the parts of the brain (amygdala, hippocampus, and prefrontal cortex) and how they control our emotions.