Week 1

 It was great seeing everyone at the Meet the Teacher event on Friday. I loved seeing the smiling faces of my returning students and it was great meeting the new students in Mrs. Hobb's class too. I'm looking forward to a great year in first grade. This was the bulletin board outside our classroom. We will be putting student work up soon.

Here's a peak at what we learned in language arts the first week of school.

We began the week by coloring an ABC find. Here we are acting all quiet and shy as we first arrived to our classroom. The quietness quickly subsided as the week went by, LOL.

We started out the week by reviewing the Hill Agreements. We read the book Do Unto Otters to help remind us of the agreement, mutual respect. We learned that we want to treat others the way that we wanted to be treated. We also drew pictures of a way that we could show mutual respect.

Mrs. Hobb's class has many great artists too!

The next Hill Agreement we learned was The Right to Participate and the Right to Pass. We read the book, The Recess Queen to help demonstrate this agreement. 

This was a story about a girl named Mean Jean who bullied others on the playground until a new girl named Katie Sue asked her to play. After reading the book, we wrote a letter to Ms. Ellis during our shared writing time. We brainstormed things that we could do on the playground if we were confronted with a bully.

We read the book, First Grade Jitters. We talked about how we all were a bit nervous about starting first grade. We chorally read a Jitter Juice poem from the pocket chart and then added this poem to our poetry folders. 

One of our favorite activities was making Jitter Juice and we had an even better time drinking it. The students really believed that this juice took away their fears. I overheard one boy saying he was going to make it for his brother so he wouldn't be afraid to go under water. So cute!

We did a writing activity and wrote the recipe for Jitter Juice so we can make it at home too.

Other fun books we read this week were First Grade, Here I Come! and First Grade Stinks. These were also books about nervous first graders going to school that changed their minds.

We had fun doing our "Find a Friend" activity. We got to know each other by finding friends with certain criteria. This was a great ice breaker.

We began our Writer's Workshop by discussing what authors do and reading a book with the same title.

We practiced creating an image in our minds, drawing a picture of that image and writing words about that image.

We read the wordless book, Pancakes for Breakfast. We learned that one way authors tell stories is through their pictures. We also learned that we can read a book by looking at the pictures too and telling a story. It is more fun to use descriptive words than labeling words as Mrs. Langham read us the story two different ways. We applied this to our writing and wrote sentences instead of labeling.

We began our Reading Workshop by creating anchor charts that set expectations for learning. The first chart helps us remember what to do when Mrs. Langham is reading to us.

We read the book, A Quiet Place to help remind us that interruptions and distractions during reading can make reading more difficult for us and we all like to have a quiet place to go to when we are reading.

We created an anchor chart to show what respectful readers do.

We want to enjoy reading, but we must learn how to take care of our books. Pretty soon, we will be bringing books home daily and we need to take care of the books so that others will be able to enjoy them too. Here are some of the books that we read to help remind us how to treat our books.

We created an anchor chart about being a book lover, and not a book bully.

Each time we made an anchor chart, we had a smaller version that we put in our Reader's Workshop Anchor Chart notebook. This is kept in our book box to help remind us of strategies we can use when we are reading.

We had an opportunity to practice these skills while reading quietly in the classroom. We read the book, Dex the Wonder Dog. This book helped us to learn that if we want to get better at something, we have to practice and work harder in order to get better, just like Dex did in the story. We applied this to our reading and practiced building our stamina in both reading and writing workshop.

One of the last things we did this week was to take a spelling test. This is in anticipation of our spelling homework. Your child's spelling list will be unique. I will be choosing words that your child needs to work on based on spelling tests and your child's writing. Believe it or not, they thought the spelling test was fun.

What a GREAT start to the new school year! We are practicing classroom procedures and expectations. 
During Mrs. Hobbs' rotation we heard three books that help us remember our Hill Agreements. Tacky the Penguin reminds us to appreciate our unique differences. We made our own unique Tacky. Listen Buddy helps us remember the importance of attentive listening. We played a listening game to "test" our hearing. Doing our Dillo Best is exactly what The Little Engine That Could teaches us. We thought about what one thing we were good at - we are good at so many things - and then completed a page to share our thinking. We also read, sang, and danced to Pete the Cat. He taught us that no matter what happens, "it's all good."  Our Pete pictures were rockin'!

In Mathematics, we read Too Many Toys and Tools. Then we made a T-chart that showed the differences between toys and tools.    
Also, we collected data about how we get home and then created a graph. We learned more about each other when we colored a glyph. After, we found friends who had the same information. The results were surprising! In our Mathematics Notebook we wrote and drew our thinking about Mathematics. All week we explored manipulatives and learned the routine and procedure for their use.

In Science, we thought about and then drew a picture of a scientist and the tools they use. Next, we read a book about scientists and found out that ...
 * scientists are everywhere
 * scientists study everything
 * scientists  are curious, ask lots of questions, and try to find           answers
We thought about our own questions and put them on cards. These are going up on our Science bulletin board.
Pig Pig Gets a Job and Bea and Mr. Jones showed us that school is our job and each day we will try to do our Dillo Best.

We look forward to seeing you at our Back to School Night on Thursday, September 6th. It begins at 6:30 in the cafeteria. Instead of going to the classroom after the PTA presentation, Mrs. Langham and Mrs. Hobbs classes will remain in the cafeteria for a combined presentation. We will be talking about what we will be learning in first grade and explain our homework and grading policy.