Week 7

First graders enjoying a pancake breakfast from the school board

Our class partying that we have a working Smart Board!

First graders making napkin ghosts

First graders with their napkin ghosts

This week was fun!

Important Reminders: Next Thursday is picture day; Read twenty books and fill in the sheet for your child to receive a free pan pizza from Pizza Hut each month.

Special Guests: We had excellent parent and community volunteers this week.  Thank you so much!  

One of our community volunteers that works closely with the local police gave a great lesson about bullying!

The school board came to the school and did a pancake breakfast for the kids, which they all absolutely loved!

Funny Stuff From Kids: When taking a test on the computer: "I accidentally took the wrong test.  It was so hard.  I think it was a 14th grade test.". . .They just keeping adding more grades every year!

One student loves to use his fingers to add.  When working on adding sums greater than ten, I asked if he could think of any other ways to add when we have answers bigger than ten.  He said, "We could use an alien's hand, because they have six fingers!"

We've started a new reward system to help the class listen.  Basically, when they're good we add a glass pebble to the jar.  One student said, "I know what else you could call those instead of pebbles." "What?" "Jams." "Oh, you're right.  We could call them gems." "NO, TEACHER!  IT'S JAMS!"    

Homework: Please continue doing the weekly homework.  Students get a prize for every 8 homework assignments (one week’s worth) that they complete.

Social Studies: We've been focusing on learning about people and places all over the world.  They've had fun looking at maps and learning different customs.  We watched a short video about different birthday celebrations around the world.  

Math: We've been learning about adding, rectangles, and ordinal numbers (first, second, third. . .instead of 1, 2, 3).  I'm not satisfied with our current math lessons, especially in regards to the sequence of the lessons and their relevance to the homework.  I will look at the math program this coming weekend and figure out how to best make it work in our class.  

Project Read/Spelling: This week’s focus was the short u sound.  The kids did fairly well on the spelling test, and I think we're ready to move on.

Speedy Words and Rocket Math: Although students are in different places, every student is progressing, which is awesome!  So, we’re just pressing forward with our daily practice and timings on the highest frequency words in the English language, along with basic addition facts, and I feel that it’s really helping.

AR: 20 books by the end of October!  Your kids can do it!

Writing: This week we did activities focusing on the basics of a sentence.  Every sentence needs a capital, a period, a doer, and what the doer is doing.  

Science: This week we continued working on our skills of thinking like scientists.  We combined writing and science quite often.  The highlight of the week was seeing what happened when we combined sand and water versus blue sand and water.  My blue sand is called hydrophobic sand, and it doesn't mix with water to make mud.  It actually repels from the water.  The kids had a blast seeing how it works.