Week 5

Our class and our puppet guest, "Mrs. O"

Our class learning about Nurse Wight's job

Those row of hand-drawn pictures represent the community we invented as a class

Week went well. First grade is hectic, adventuresome, and full of growth.  It’s great to see the kids learn so much and have fun in the process.  Here’s this week’s highlights:

Special Guests: This week we had Ambia Pawlak from the community come in and talk to the kids about 911 and safety.  She works closely with the police department.  It was a great review for the kids, and they enjoyed having a community guest.

Funny Sayings From Kids: In the book we’re reading as a class, a new character arose named “Alice Lunderson.”  Many of the kids kept referring to her as “Alice Wonderland!”  One student said this funny remark, “My dad used to be a cowboy. . .well, I guess he still is. . .kind of. . .”  I just thought that was funny because I know the dad considers himself a cowboy-not a “used-to-be cowboy”

Homework: The weekly homework seems to be going well.  I think I’ll stick with it for now.

Social Studies: We talked about how a community is a group of people helping each other.  We made up our own make-believe community called, “Frindletown.”  The kids each drew a picture of their section of the community (post office, store, restaurant, park, etc.) We lined all the pictures up in a row on the wall for our community.  At the end of the year, we’ll review the concept of community and make a 3D community with clay, blocks, etc.

Math: We're starting into addition and subtraction, and the kids are mostly grasping it well.  This week we’ve been trying out math centers so I can help the kids in smaller groups.  It seems to be working well, and I think we’ll stick with it for awhile.

Project Read/Spelling: This week’s focus was the short o sound.  We had a visit from Mrs. O (a puppet whose mouth makes a nice O shape), and the kids absolutely loved it!

Speedy Words and Rocket Math: We’re continuing daily practice and timings on the highest frequency words in the English language, along with basic addition facts.

AR: Many kids are over half way to their Samurai (20 books by the end of October).  Way to go!  Remember, they can take tests at school on the books they read at home. 

Writing: We’ve been focusing on the barebones of a sentence.  It’s complicated to explain it in writing, but it basically means that we need four things to have a sentence: a capital, punctuation (a stop sign of some sort), a “doer” (noun-person/animal, place, thing), and something for the “doer” to do (verb-action).

Science: The highlight of this week’s science was cutting open a bouncy ball-and making a hypothesis, of course-to see what’s inside.