Tomorrow is half day hat day! Donate $1 and wear a hat in school.
Friday, April 28th is a half day of school. The school doors will not open until 8:30. Please make sure your child knows who they will be with when school is dismissed. Changes in the routine can be hard for young children. Our students looked great for today's career day! It was exciting to see all of the creative ways the children dressed up. I think we had the safest, healthiest class at Willett, with three police officers and two doctors! :) Next week will be very exciting! From May 1st through May 7th, the Willett PTO is sponsoring our "Blank"-a-Thon fundraiser to earn money for our playground. This is also national Screen-Free Week. It is a great opportunity for families to set aside the electronics, turn off the TV, and get moving! There are several activities in the community to enjoy during the week. ** There will be no homework to allow you more time to participate in the following fun events: Wednesday, May 3rd: Willett night at Bliss Dairy & meet-up to play at the playground across the street Friday, May 5th: Willett FREE swim at the Downtown YMCA Saturday, May 6th: 1:30 until 3:30: Visit the Norton Outdoor Center of the Attleboro YMCA to use the ropes course and play games Week long activities: Visit the Painted Turtle in Attleboro Activities at Capron Park Zoo Check out the Willett PTO Facebook page for any additional updates about Screen Free Week and the Blank-a-Thon! ***We need boxes of tissues for our classroom please! Thank you! We also really appreciate donations of disinfecting wipes, Expo markers, and glue sticks. Welcome to 2017! I hope that everyone had an enjoyable vacation.
This week, we are revisiting the long u words in Reading Street that we started learning about during our last few days together in December. We are also learning about the three different sounds that the affix -ed makes at the ends of words such as, played, kicked, and counted. The children pointed out to me that I sent home NEXT week's homework packet by mistake. Just another example of how we all make mistakes! :) I told them to still complete the homework packet and next week, their homework packet will be the one they should have had this week. With this in mind, the story we are working on this week in class is Life In The Forest. In class next week, we will work on Honey Bees. During math we are learning about place value. At this point in first grade we focus on the ones and tens place. We are using Base-10 block longs and cubes to build numbers and exchange for groups of tens. Your children made place value mats on Tuesday which we used in class and sent home on Wednesday. They should be able to demonstrate their newly learned skills for you at home with numbers up to 50. When the weather permits, we go outside for recess. Please be sure that your student has a coat, hat, and mittens for recess. ***IMPORTANT REMINDER: Our classroom is "nut safe" which means that students are not permitted to eat nut products for our morning snack in the room. Anything containing nuts, for example, peanut butter cookies or crackers, must be saved for lunch in the cafeteria. This sometimes leaves students without a snack. Please remember this as you and your child are making snack choices each day. We have had so much illness already this winter. :( Please remind your children about cough and sneeze etiquette and practice coughing and sneezing into their elbows. Also please encourage your children to keep their fingers away from their eyes, noses, and mouths. We spend lots of time blowing noses, washing hands, and cleaning classroom surfaces, but little reminders are always helpful for our little friends. If your child is ill, please use your best judgement about whether or not they can come to school. Our school handbook does provide some guidelines for when students have had fevers or have been vomitting. Let's do all we can to prevent having sick students (and teachers). It is December already? The time is flying by this year! Each day our "special helper of the day" gets to run calendar time. The students use this time to practice the days of the week, months of the year, and to discuss how many days of school. During this time we also work on developing our number sense. For example, today was our 63rd day of first grade. The children are able to explain that the number 63 is made of 6 "bundles" of 10 and 3 ones. The students are also counting down how many days until our winter vacation. This started this morning when a few students arrived and asked me how many days were left. Of course I could not just tell them! We turned the question into a math problem that they could solve on their own. We have started our new Reading Street unit which focuses on communities. This week, we will read Who Works Here? This is a nonfiction piece about community helpers. The children are becoming very knowlegable about communities and working together to help our community. Our phonics skill for the week focuses on CVCe words. These are words that have a consonant, vowel, consonant, e pattern, such as like and bike. We have been talking about how these words have a long vowel sound and the first vowel says it's own name, with the help of the e at the end of the word. Your children call that e "King Ed". We are learning to add details to our writing using our five senses. We have done some exploring with mystery items and the children had to use their senses to figure out what the items were. We have been reading to hear where authors add sensory details to their writing. Soon we will be doing some writing of our own so we can add details that connect to our five senses. We have been working on measuring during math. We also continue to work on using number lines, number grids, change diagrams, and manipulatives to solve addition and subtraction strategies. Today during math, we also learned about making and using bar graphs to collect and keep track of data. Ask your child what superpowers they could chose to have during this lesson. We have been talking about being kind to one another and doing things each day to make people happy. We have a "Random acts of Kindness" calendar in our classroom which we will be using each day. Today's random act of kindness is to donate a canned good. Since our class is participating in our school's food drive, this is a great act of kindness. I have included the calendar as a file below so you can talk about it with your children at home.
Our students have finished the first Reading Street unit. For the next two weeks we will be learning about different animals and the habitats they live in. This is separate from Reading Street, so you will not see the regular homework packet coming home with your child. Instead, we will just send a 2-sided reading log so your child can keep track of their nightly reading as their homework. There is also a "Book of the Week" activity, which is like a mini-book report for your child to complete as part of the homework. Regular homework will resume on November 13th.
Please remember that Monday, October 31st is a fall spirit day at Willett. Students can choose to wear colors that remind them of fall. I am looking forward to seeing our classroom filled with autumn colors. Please remember that students are not allowed to wear Halloween costumes to school. Please do not send any candy to school with your child for snack or for a treat at lunch. Our new Elmo, donated through the generosity of friends, family, and anonymous donors through DonorsChoose.org has been a wonderful tool in our classroom. Ask your children about the great ways we have used it for learning and for sharing our work with one another. We are always grateful when families can donate containers of Lysol wipes to our class. We clean our desks and tables daily to reduce the spread of germs. Hopefully, this will be a healthy school year for all of us. We also use Expo markers a lot. The skinny ones are the easiest for small hands to grasp. Thank you to anyone who can (or has) donated these to our class. Parent conferences are on Wednesday and Thursday this week. If you have not confirmed your appointment time, please do so as soon as possible. Please remember that conferences are only 10 minutes each. This is not much time, so I like to suggest that you jot down any questions you may wish to ask so you do not forget. Please be on time. Out of respect for the families meeting with me after you, I really do need to limit conferences to the scheduled time slots. Thank you for your patience and understanding. Please remember that I am available by email using the staff listings on the Willett School homepage. You can also comment on this site, or contact the school if you need to reach me. Our students have been working hard in first grade! This week, our Reading Street work included reading The Big Blue Ox, a fantasy story in which an ox is very helpful to Mom and Pop. We have practiced identifying the setting and characters as we read. We have also practiced writing sentences that have a capital letter at the beginning and a period at the end.
Mrs. David and Ms. Bernier have been working with our class every Monday. They read stories and do activities with us that will help the students understand their different feelings. We also work on ways to get along with others. During math we have been learning lots of strategies for addition, including counting up and down the number line, using a number grid for adding, and using objects to practice adding. Today we played two fisted penny addition. We started with ten pennies and had to take a few pennies in our right hands, and figure out how many pennies were left in our left. The children will continue working on ways to add two numbers together to make ten next week. **** Tomorrow is a half day of school! Willett's doors open at 8:30. Dismissal is at 12:25. Tomorrow is also half day hat day. Your child can wear his or her favorite hat by donating $1 to our PTO. It is also Red Sox and Patriots spirit day. Wear your favorite sports shirt! :) Monday is Columbus Day. We will not have school. We will see you on Tuesday. Have you checked out the Remind App yet? This is a great way for me to send you quick text updates about our class, and events at school. I encourage you to check out this app and sign up. I also frequently use my classroom website and emails to keep you informed about our school day. Join Mrs. Dooley on Remind:
I am so proud of how well the children are working to learn to routines and expectations of our first grade classroom!
The students have gym tomorrow (Wednesday) and will need to wear sneakers to school, as well as clothes that are comfortable for participating in gym activities. Please remember that this Friday is a half day. Willett's doors open at 8:30 on half days. Students will be dismissed at 12:30 so teachers can attend professional development sessions. The children will have snack, but not lunch. Please send in a note if your child's dismissal routine will change on the half day. Have you singed up for the Remind App yet? If not, please check out the information below. This is a great tool that I can use for quick, sometimes last minute updates about our classroom. Do you know other parents from our class? Encourage them to sign up too! Over the next few weeks I will be introducing the children to using IPads in our classroom. I try to incorporate a variety of types of technology into our learning experiences. If you have access to technology at home, there are a number of great sites you can use. We will use GoNoodle, Epic books for kids, Spelling City, and Tumblebooks, to name just a few. I am working with DonorsChoose.org to try to purchase something called an ELMO for the classroom. This technology will allow me to project student work samples, videos, and even 3-dimensional objects onto a video screen during lessons. Think of it as a highly advanced overhead projector. Remember to mark your calendars for our Willett Welcome Back Night on September 22nd. We look forward to seeing you! I am trying out something new this year. I am using an app called Remind to help me send quick notes and reminders to you. Sometimes the teachers like to send a last minute reminder about a special event, like a spirit day at Willett. I encourage you to check out this app and sign up. I also frequently use my classroom website and emails to keep you informed about our school day.
Join Mrs. Dooley on Remind:
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