Team Kindness News
Friday, April 21st, 2023
Here’s what we have been learning this week!
Sharing our Community Maps during Social Studies!
We learned about and celebrated Earth Day last week during our monthly 1st Grade Community Building time. Here is our completed bulletin board with our coffee filter worlds being held in our hands!
Reading
This week we began looking at how stories can teach us lessons. We began by predicting what the lessons of some of our books may be before we start reading. We also learned that we can figure this out by thinking about the problem and how it was solved, noticing how and why the characters' feelings change, and/or thinking about the lessons that the characters themselves learn. We read a variety of books and practiced figuring out what the author was trying to teach us. We will continue our work on this next week as well.
Math
We began Module 10 this week where we are spending some time really digging into subtraction and understanding what subtraction equations represent, how they are created, and which numbers are the parts and which is the total. We talked more about related subtraction facts, which are two subtraction equations that have the same total and same parts, and practiced creating word stories to match a variety of pictures that would help us create related subtraction sentences.
Writing
We continued working on our opinion writing this week by writing a reason to support our opinions. We also worked on editing all of the writing we've done so far, checking for proper letter sizes, punctuation, spacing, and taking some extra time to use all of our phonics learning to stretch out the sounds in our words so we can spell them the best we can.
Unfortunately, we had to change our plans for writing on Thursday after a more challenging time in art class when the majority of the class was not listening to Mrs. Hilgers's directions to clean up. Many students chose to either continue working on their projects, drawing, or wandering around the room instead of helping clean up. It took so long for everyone to get on track that it caused the next class that was coming into art to miss more than 5 minutes of their art time. We talked about all of this as a class back in our room and decided to write apology letters to Mrs. Hilgers and/or the 2nd grade class that we caused to miss their art time. We delivered these letters on Friday
Phonics
Our phonics learning this week heavily supported our writing work. We first looked at how to spell all the way across your words. We did a review of our word mapping with our pop-it page to help us stretch our each part of our words. We learned that writers need to pay special attention to the ending sounds of words. We then spent some additional time really looking at the ending of our words and learning that there are an armload of super-important word parts that end in a blend. It is really helpful to know important word parts such as -ank, -est, - ing, -ink, -ump, and -ink.
Social Studies
We spent time this week sharing our maps with each other and discovering how we all have different routes to school based on where we live.
Odds and Ends
Zoo Field Trip: We had an AMAZING response for chaperoning our zoo field trip. Thank you all for volunteering! Unfortunately, we are limited in how many chaperones we can take with us. I will be drawing names and sending out emails today to let you know if you were selected to join us.
Extra Snacks: Thank you to everyone that sent in extra snacks for our cabinet! We should be set for the rest of the year!
Reading BINGO Homework - April Reading BINGO homework will be due back on Monday, May 1st. Keep reading and enjoy more yummy treats throughout the year!
Repeat Information:
Bay Lane Elementary BLAZE AND BOOKS
Wednesday, May 17, 2023 is Celebrate Reading Day
School Day Celebration:
Books Knock Your Socks Off - Wear Crazy Socks
Reading is Better With a Buddy - Bring your favorite stuffed animal to school (It must fit in your backpack)
Words Bring Us Together - Wear clothing with words
Evening Family Celebration: From 5-7 PM is
Come with a grown up to:
Shop the Book Fair
Participate in fun games and reading activities in the library
Get your picture taken with Blaze!!!
Parent Volunteers - Help Needed!: Several of you have inquired about supporting our first grade Bobcats here at school. At this time, we will not have parent volunteers in the classroom, but as a first grade team, we are looking for some parent volunteers to help with prep work on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 11 AM-noon starting next week. If you are interested in helping with making copies, putting together materials for classrooms, lamination, etc., please sign up for a time slot HERE. This sign-up is for all first-grade families so please allow the opportunity for others to sign up as well. As a reminder, any adult in the building needs to be an approved volunteer. Please complete THIS FORM if you are not yet approved and then wait for your confirmation before signing up. Thank you!
School Directory: Have you signed up for our Bay Lane School DirectorySpot yet? This is the only way other families here at school have to access your contact information and needs to be done each year as the directory is cleared out at the end of each year. Please take a few minutes and Sign Up Here!
Looking Ahead
- Wednesday, May 10th - Field Trip to First Stage
- Wednesday, May 17th - Bay Lane Elementary BLAZE AND BOOKS - Crazy Sock Day!
- Friday, May 19th - Field Trip to the Zoo - Bring a cold lunch with a drink if you did not order one!
- Thursday, May 25th - Walking Field Trip to the Muskego Public Library - More info to come!
- Friday, May 26th & Monday, May 29th- No School
Important Links
Your Partners in Learning,
Email: stephanie.rodenkirch@muskegonorway.org
Website: https://sites.google.com/muskegonorway.org/falksen/home
Location: Bay Lane Elementary School, Hilltop Drive, Muskego, WI, USA
Phone: 262-971-1810 6309
What a week we've had! We started with our Kids Heart Challenge Assembly on Monday afternoon and had so much fun with the Mario Cart races.