Room 18 News
5 December 2014
Upcoming Dates
School Wide Field Trip to see Shrek December 18th
Winter Break: December 22 to January 2
Classes Resume: January 5th
Investigating Numbers with Base Ten Blocks
Making predictions about Ooblick
Practicing measuring
Our Week
Dear Families,
I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and enjoyed having a resident first grade expert on Thanksgiving. We had hoped to have our Pilgrim report ready for publication before Thanksgiving but we needed a little more time to finish polishing our reports for you. We hope you enjoy our reports once we get them finished!
We’re getting settled back in to our routine. We started our classroom’s community service project this week with a food drive for the Bloomington Humane Society. We will be collecting: dog and cat food (dye free, Purina or better) cat litter (non-clumping), towels (clean, old or new), dog toys (Kyla or Nyla brand), catnip and washable cat toys until December 18th. If you’d like to participate you may send items in with your student or just drop them off in Room 18.
Following our Furry Friend theme in our workjobs this week, we worked to create an pet word dictionary and worked on putting words into ABC order. We wrote sentences to go with our dictionary entries focusing on complete ideas and using appropriate capitalization and punctuation. We created a wanted poster for a pet we might like to get and practiced our persuasive writing skills as to why our grownups should get us said pet.
We are back in the spelling test swing and our spelling test are going well. While we do practice our words at school some, I would encourage you to help your child practice at home as well as help them see how they can extend the pattern or the sound that we are working with. This kind of practice can be very informal: in the car, waiting at the doctor’s, on a walk, and so on. Use clues like “If you can spell red, how would you spell sled?” Or “How would you change cap into cup? Cup into cop? Cop into chop?
In Reading groups, students continue to progress in texts at their own levels. Some of us are working in chapter books, some in easy picture books, and some in predictable texts. All of the stories we’ve worked with have provided us ample opportunity to practice with skills we’re focusing on such as the ch, th, and sh digraphs; finding base words and endings such as –s, -ed, and –ing. We are also looking for compound words and talking about how knowing these things can help us with a new word. We are thinking about all of the things good readers do and working on using them to help us make sense of what we read. Good readers make pictures in their heads of the story as they go along. Good readers compare pictures and letter clues to see if they match. If they find a word they can’t sound out, they might skip it, read to the end of the line and then go back. Or, they might put in a word that makes sense, even if it doesn’t match the letters to continue making meaning. Most of all, good readers know that reading is about making sense of the text and they don’t give up!
We are talking about place value—finding the hundreds, tens, and ones place. We are learning about the differences between these places—a three in the tens place means something much different than a three in the ones place. Following up on this, we have learned a game to play with dice and base ten blocks called Race to One Hundred. It involves making groups of ten with ones, trading ten ones for one ten and then, ten tens for one one hundred—until the total reaches one hundred. It is a lot of fun, strengthens our number sense, reinforces basic facts and lays the foundation for learning to borrow and carry. We are also practicing looking at a number and telling how many tens and ones in it. We continue to practice telling time to the hour and half hour, counting money and exchanging coins for equivalences.
We continue our work with measurement. We are working on thinking about what unit of measurement one would chose to measure a length; inch, centimeter, foot, yard, meter, mile or kilometer. We practiced measuring to the nearest inch or centimeter. We measured ourselves in inches and created a graph of all the different heights in our room. We introduced the idea of a “typical” height for a first grader. On our graph, we found that the typical height for our class was about 50 inches. Our data did make a lovely bell curve.
We have been learning about states of matter with our IU students. We've focused mostly on learning about the properties of a liquid and a solid. This week, we experimented with Ooblick, a non-Newtonian fluid which displays properties of both a liquid and a solid.
Have a great weekend!
Laura B.About Us
Email: lbonde@mccsc.edu
Website: www.mccsc.edu
Location: 2200 East 2nd Street, Bloomington, IN, United States
Phone: 812-330-7767