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.
weareteachers_random_acts_of_kindness_calendar.pdf |