Week of March 26-30

Dear Parents,

We hope you are all enjoying the beautiful weather we’ve had!  It’s hard to believe March is coming to an end!  Students have been doing a marvelous job in school.  We have been working very hard across all subject areas and making some excellent connections between our academic units!

We will be holding conferences next week.  Thank you all for signing up!  Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday (28^th, 29^th, and the 30^th) will be half days and conferences will be held during the evening/afternoon hours.  We are looking forward to seeing all of you as we have many wonderful things to share!

Here is a look at the week ahead:

Reading: Students have enjoyed interacting with books with their partners and during whole group settings!  We have practiced asking questions and inferring our authors’ messages.  We have also looked closely at characters and how they change throughout a story.  Next week, students will be able to share and celebrate their favorite authors.  Students may bring in books from their favorite authors, if they wish.  We will also continue to explore characters while focusing on two of our beloved characters; Frog and Toad.  We will review their character traits and will discuss the difference between the “main” character and the “secondary” character.

Word Work/Handwriting: Students have really enjoyed learning more about adjectives, nouns, and verbs!  We were able to apply our new knowledge of these words to some spring activities!  Be sure to check out our amazing spring adjectives that are hanging outside our classrooms!  Next week, we will continue to explore and apply the use of adjectives, nouns, and verbs through writing, reading, and games.

Writing:  Students have been working so hard on collecting several topics and information!  We have practiced dividing our topic ideas into sections for our Table of Contents and we have practiced gathering facts and information for our Informational Texts.  Next week, we will start our publishing process.  Students will select a topic from their writing folders (it will be a tough job; there are so many amazing collected pieces!) and will begin organizing, revising, editing, and publishing.  Students will be creating their very own Non-Fiction Informational book!

Math: Students did a wonderful job during our review week of “True and False”, unknown numbers, and time.  We have started Unit 7, which looks at patterns and counting by two’s, and we will continue through the unit next week.  We will be practicing counting by two’s, reviewing picture, shape, and number patters and will be taking an end-of-unit assessment by late in the week.  We will be ready to begin Unit 8, “Twos, Fives, and Tens” by the first week of April.

Science: Students have been working on getting organized and ready to begin finalizing their science projects.  Students will have many choices as we complete our animal projects.  Students will be able to draft scripts for a voice thread, draw, find, or create pictures of their animals, and incorporate their facts and information notes into their projects in through written work or “speeches”.  Students are very excited to be able to decide how they want their project to look and they are coming up with very creative ways to display their knowledge of animals!

We hope you have a wonderful weekend!  We look forward to speaking with you during our conferences next week!

~Your first grade teachers: Miss Field and Mrs. McIntire