1ST GRADE NEWS FROM ROOM 8
WEEK 19 ~ Jan 3 - 6, 2023 and WEEK 20 ~ Jan 9 - 13, 2023
Dear Room 8 Families,
I hope all of you enjoyed the rainy 3-day weekend!
I apologize for not getting a newsletter out last week. As many of you know my mom passed on Thursday, January 5. She had been on hospice for the past 2 years. Our whole family got to be with her and she was surrounded by so much love right up to the end, and I am so grateful for that. Thank you for all of the heartfelt cards and beautiful flowers you have sent in. I'm so touched by all of the love and support. Going back to work has been really good for me ... the 1st graders always lift my spirits and bring a huge smile to my face. My mom was also a teacher and loved her job. We shared a classroom for 11 years together at Sycamore Valley Elementary in Danville when I was having babies and raising little ones. :)
Below you will find a recap of what we've been doing in 1st grade these first 2 weeks of 2023.
Happy MLK Day!
Warmly,
Kristie / Mrs. Darin
ROOM 8 BIRTHDAYS!
We've celebrated 2 birthdays since coming back from winter break:
Vidyha turned 7 on January 6th and Izzy turned 7 on January 8th!
NEW YEAR'S RESOLUTIONS
MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.
This past week, we got to spend some time learning and talking all about Martin Luther King, Jr. We read a book called Happy Birthday Martin Luther King by Jean Marzollo, we listened to Dr. King's most famous speech in the children's book, I Have a Dream, and we watched a BrainPop video on MLK’s life and contributions. We made our own “Dream” books, and we made portraits of Martin Luther King Jr. out of construction paper.
READING WORKSHOP
In reader’s workshop we started a new unit called “Learning About the World” in which the focus is on nonfiction reading strategies. We began the unit by comparing fiction and nonfiction books. We talked about getting started as a nonfiction reader and learned that when we’re reading nonfiction books, we start learning about a topic even before we read a page by taking a good sneak peek. We also learned that readers who want to get super smart about a topic don’t just let the pages fly by. Instead they read each page closely, getting as much as they can out of each one. We also learned that we can even guess what might come next in our nonfiction books before we turn the pages by thinking about what we have read and what would make sense coming next.
PHONICS WORKSHOP
WRITING WORKSHOP
In writer’s workshop, we also started a new informational writing unit called “All About" this week. In this nonfiction unit, we will be writing teaching books all about a topic. We generated a list of topics we know all about under the categories animals, places, things, and activities so that we can look to this list for topics to write about. We began this unit by learning how to get started writing a teaching book. We learned that before we write a teaching book, we plan how our books will go by picking a topic and saying our information across our fingers, making sure we know a lot abut this topic. We got the chance to rehearse this with a partner before we started writing. The next step is to quickly sketch something we’ll write on each of the pages. After that we can begin to write the words, making sure we tell something different about our topic on each of the different pages of our books.
MATH WORKSHOP
We read Snowmen at Night by Caralyn Buehner and made snowmen glyphs in which our snowmen told how old we are, whether we like warm or cold weather, whether or not we like hot cocoa and whether or not we like candy canes! We did some data collection and graphing activities with the snowmen glyphs that each student made.
We also dove into the skill of comparing numbers using the greater than (>), less than (<), and equal to (=) symbols. We made our symbols into alligators always wanting to chomp the bigger number. We played lots of dice games and card games with partners to practice comparing numbers. We started with smaller numbers and moved into comparing 2-digit numbers, using our base ten blocks to help us compare.