This Week in First Grade (12-9-13)

Here are some highlights from this week!

A special visitor...

• First graders have been learning about the different types of teeth and what they do, so our visitor this week came at the perfect time. Students at Star Academy got to learn about how to take care of their own teeth!

Reading:

• On Friday, we learned to Read for Meaning at an assembly with Phil Tulga. Through music, we learned about three reading strategies: sequence, inference, and prediction. We were grooving and dancing and learning all about reading! So fun! See the blog post about the assembly with pictures, video, and more on the Star Academy blog! 
• We heard a story called The Snow Deer, and there are 10 pictures to help us remember the sequence of the story. After hearing the story a few times throughout the week, we talked about some important elements of the story(author, title, setting, characters, problem, solution). You can talk about these same story elements in the books you read at home with your child!
   
  

Science/Social Studies:

• This week we learned about a new animal  in the woodland habitat in Europe... the fallow deer! The fallow deer is an example of an ungulate and it also a quadriped! Ask your child to tell you what that means. :)
  

Team Tasks:

• This week, we focused a lot on cooperation. At the beginning of the week, we brainstormed what cooperation looks and sounds like, and we continued to add to the list throughout the week. Teams earned bonus points during team tasks for doing the things we put on the chart.

One team working on the Immigrants from Europe World Map Team Task

Writing:

• We read the book Written Anything Good Lately? by Susan Allen and Jane Lindaman and talked about all of the things that writers write. Writers write more than just books! Writing is so important and useful, and best of all, FUN! We made lists of what writers write in our notebooks and here are some things that we came up with...
• books
• emails
• text messages
• shopping lists
• stories
• thank you notes
• Christmas cards
• letters
• songs
• poems
• chants
• non fiction books
• comics
• reminders on sticky notes
• We wrote letters to Miss Kloczko... (I LOVED reading these!)
  
• We listened to the story Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen and made lists in our writers notebooks of all of the words that we liked in the story as we listened. Then, in the computer lab, we typed the words from our notebooks into a google form. See the word cloud below with all of the words that we wrote. The bigger a word is, the more first graders there are that wrote it!