Thank you all for your active participation in parent teacher conferences. We really enjoyed meeting with all of you and look forward to teaming with you this year. We are all looking forward to the Grade 1 field trip to Hacienda Hay and Feed on Thursday, October 30, (this is a free dress day). Following the long weekend and conferences the students returned fully prepared to take on the work ahead. In math this week we concentrated on the practical meaning of place value, digit/s, and numbers through the building of numbers up to 100. This was accomplished using base ten blocks and place value sheets. Mental math is now a primary component to our daily transitions where students are practicing strategies for holding numbers in their heads for short term retrieval as well as solving long strings of numbers by mentally manipulating them. In literacy, we worked on identifying setting, character perspectives, and main events. Fundations continues with the introduction of sentence structure, phrasing, trick word practice, and new vocabulary. Students have now moved into the editing phase of their independent writing where they are attending to meaning, capitals, and periods. In reading we are exploring the vowel digraphs and word endings. In history, students began their study of Native Americans with an exploration of artifacts such as leather, arrow heads, abalone rattles, reed whitles, etc. The students are in the process of writing and editing their essays on Native Americans. This week in Social Sciences students began Feurstein's instrumental enrichment with the "Organization of Dots." Thank you for all of your efforts with nightly reading it is such a great support for building academic stamina. Be sure to drop a note in the homework folder if a book or Lexia level is too easy/too hard and we will adjust it.
We are happy to announce our first field trip is scheduled for Thursday, October 30, 2014. We will be visiting Hacienda Hay and Feed from 8:50-11:10 am. Students may wear free dress with appropriate footwear. We will return to campus for lunch.
This week in math we started math sprints to practice automaticity of addition and subtraction facts within 10. We investigated the importance of zero as a place holder and continued our exploration of the difference between digits and numbers. A review of everything we have studied up until this point is being conducted and the unit on adding and subtracting within 20 is well underway. In literacy and reading we are studying parts of words and have introduced the glued sound of "all." The first dictation of the year took place as a practice and will become a regular informal assessment for trick words, decodable vocabulary and sentence structure. Good fit books and the difference between reading for meaning and reading for fun is a basic part of our conversation in Grade 1. This week we conducted two informal assessments focusing on following verbal directions including position of shapes, numbers, right, left, top, and bottom. The Empathy Tool was introduced as a carpenters level where each of us strives for a balance between caring for ourselves and caring for others. The empathy tool is the basis of all the work we do with perspective taking and "walking in another's shoes." In Science this week we opened our unit on autumn with a Science Eyes project where we studied acorns and sorted them in several ways. We also created a list of vocabulary to describe what we are looking at. This helps students to develop their attention to detail so they can better observe patterns in nature and the world. Visual motor integration and fine motor skills were mediated through the use of painting, directed drawing, tracing, and cutting out. Next week we will be looking at pumpkins and gourds. The children are always welcome to bring artifacts from home that connect with what we are studying in school. Thanks for another great week! |