Week 3 in Review

We took a trip to the computer lab on Friday. Mr. Sterns is going to be teaching us all about computers (for a half hour each week) this year while Mrs. Doran pulls some of us to work with her. Today we all got our own computer to work at and learned how to log in and off of the computer. When we came back from the computer lab, Mr. Olack (our PE teacher) came in to talk to us about mileage club. Students from grades 1-5 are able to participate in mileage club on Fridays during recess if they choose. Ask us what mileage club is and if it's something we think we'll try out next Friday!

Mr. Olack wasn't the only visitor we had this week. A very special visitor came. This is "Zero the Hero". Everyday we are counting how many days we've been in school. We count the days by adding straws to a pocket chart. We add those straws to the ones place. On the tenth day of school we learned that '10' won't fit in the 'ones place' because it has two digits and not just one. We were a bit worried, but Zero flew in to save the day. We really liked him and know that he will be back when we're on our 20th day of school. Ask us some of Zero's favorite foods!

Mrs. Doran taught us some more math games this week. After she taught them to us and we practiced as a whole group, she split us into smaller groups and we worked at 'centers'. We did a really good job with this and soon we will be working at centers while Mrs. Doran meets with us for small group instruction.

One of the games we learned is called, "Top It". Top it may remind you of a card game you played as a child called 'War'. The leader passes out all the cards in a deck of special math cards. Then we all flip one of our cards over. Whoever has the card with the largest number gets to keep all the cards. This is a great game and an easy one to recreate at home. You can try it yourself. To challenge us, you can try adding some really hard numbers! Try it and leave a comment below to let Mrs. Doran know how it went!

Mrs. Doran has been amazed with how well we are doing with Writer's Workshop. She has been modeling the steps we do in our writer's notebooks and we have also been writing together practicing the same steps! Ask us what happens "when you're done" with your writing.

After we have had some time to write in our notebooks, we share our writing. We have been sharing the outsides of our writer's notebooks as well as the fabulous writing we are filling them with. Mrs. Doran has been so impressed with what we are able to do so far as writers!

Mrs. Doran created little 'offices' where we can write. They allow us to have more privacy. We LOVE this! It has also helped keep the volume in our classroom down. While we write, Mrs. Doran has been able to meet with students to test them on their reading and also to do some writing instruction. We really are awesome! Ask us to tell you our favorite way to 'celebrate' us!

Speaking of awesome, one of the wonderful things about being one of Mrs. Doran's students is that you never have to leave. These two fabulous fourth grade students have been coming in voluntarily during their recess to hear us read what we have written! They are great writers and have been so excited to hear how wonderful we are.

They may help us stretch our our sounds or help us find an idea to write about that is just right for us. In addition to these fourth graders, there are also some fifth graders who come to our class. Soon, Mrs. Doran's former first grader (now in college) will also come for a visit. She is learning how to be a teacher herself! As we're learning, this is a great place to be and Mrs. Doran's door is always open to come back and visit!

We have been so busy that Mrs. Doran sometimes wishes she had more time to work with us. In two weeks, she will be sending home some things that you can help us with. There will be more details about this next week. Sometimes it is fun to work in a different places. We took some paper and pencils outside to write all the words we know. We did a great job. Ask us how we felt the week went, and be sure to leave a comment below and let Mrs. D. what you think! She appreciates all feedback.



Please click on the videos below for some small glimpses into what we did this week...

Each week we will be learning new songs to help us learn more about word families. This week we learned about a cat named "Rat-a-Tat". We also learned that knowing how to spell 'at' can help us spell other words like cat, fat, flat, that, mat... etc.

Did you know that we have been working on 'building our stamina' as readers? When we are able to read quietly by ourselves, this allows Mrs. Doran to meet with individuals or small groups of students. So far, we have been able to read for 11 minutes! Ask us what Mrs. Doran will do when we reach 2o minutes... then ask yourself what Mrs. Doran was thinking... she's asking herself that and hoping we will be able to read for 20 minutes before the snow comes...

Week 2 in Review

We have two new friends in our room... well, not really! Ask us about the monsters Lucy and Ralph. They are helping us learn more about numbers. They help us play a game called Number Squeeze. Number Squeeze is a number guessing game where we practice numbers that are greater than and less than. We also made our own number lines and a bunny named Hoppity. Hoppity helped us with counting by ones forward and backward. You will see Hoppity and the number line coming home in our everyday folders today. In the beginning of first grade we do a lot of review. We reviewed what we learned in kindergarten about tallies. To practice, we took turns rolling dice and used tally marks to keep track of how often we rolled a certain number. We had a lot of fun doing this and it is something that is simple enough to do at home.
You can make a paper that looks like this one, get a dice and a pencil and start rolling and tallying. Most of us did very well with this activity. When the activity was over, we counted up our tallies and talked about our results. Which number did we roll the most often? What number did we roll the least often?

This week we took over the calendar routine. We have a new 'teacher' that leads us each day in the activities. Each day we are getting a little better at this fun routine.

We had our first birthday celebration this week. Happy Birthday Roman! We celebrated and sang to Roman. Just a reminder = if you have a birthday coming up, talk with Mrs. Doran about your plans for a celebration. The safe snack list is currently being looked over and edited by parents and Mr. Furca. Remember the only snacks Mrs. Doran is allowing in the classroom are fresh fruits or the snack provided by our snack mom. Thank you for your understanding in this. The students have had no problems with this and our bodies sure love healthy snacks!

Did you know that this week we celebrated Constitution Day? We learned that the Constitution is like a set of rules that the men who started our country wrote down. Mrs. Doran read us a great book called, "We the Kids" and explained the Preamble of the Constitution in words that we understood. We are very lucky to live in such a wonderful country. We also showed respect to our country's leader, President Obama, when he spoke to us and told us to always try our best, be kind to each other and celebrate our differences.

In keeping with a "country" theme we also learned about the United States Flag. Ask us how many stars are on our flag, how many stripes are on our flag and what they represent. We then read the Pledge of Allegiance while pointing our finger to each and every word. We had no idea we could read so many big words, but we did!

Every day we write in our writer's notebooks. Ask us what writers must do before they do anything else... (THINK!) Each day we think about what we want to write, say it, sketch it and plan it. We have been writing a line for each word we plan and then we write the words on the line. This is helping us organize our thoughts use spaces and get complete ideas on our papers!

Another fun thing we did this week was meet with our fifth grade learning buddies from Mrs. Turek's class. We read a great book and talked about our wishes for a great year. We started a project together but will have to finish it when we meet next week. We had a lot of fun with our new fifth grade friends!

Did you know that we have a CAFE in our room? Well... not a Cafe where you can eat, but a Cafe where you can learn! We will be adding different reading strategies to our CAFE to help us with our reading. This week we learned that "C" is for "Comprehension". That is a big word that means we need to understand what we read. Good readers stop and check to make sure that they understand what they read.
Speaking of reading, did you know that Mrs. Doran has been reading with us one on one? She told us that whenever we read little green books like this one, we need to make sure we always try our best and we did! She has read with a little over half of the class and is looking forward to reading with the rest of us hopefully next week. Remember that reading to us is SUCH an important thing to do. Even with our busy schedules, please carve out some time to spend reading to us each day. It truly does make a difference. Mrs. Doran will be talking more about that next week at curriculum night.

Click on this video to hear us tell you about the big word we learned (comprehension) and what it means.

Here we are counting by fives with our friends Ralph and Lucy. Counting by 2s, 5s and 10s is a great thing for us to do at home!

Week 1 in Review

We had a great first week in first grade! We've enjoyed getting to know each other and are picking up on our daily routines. Each morning we start with a calendar routine where we read a morning message from Mrs. Doran, work on patterns, count the days of school and review time and the days of the week. Mrs. Doran was the leader this week, but next week we will take turns being the 'teacher'.

On the first day of school, Mrs. Doran told us about herself using the 'Me-Box'. A 'Me-Box' is simply a box that we fill with things that we can use to tell about us. This is a great way to learn more about one another and to work on oral language. We also may ask questions of the person who shares and they can answer our questions adding more detail. This week Emily and Roman shared their 'Me-Boxes' and did a great job!

We also learned about three ways to read a book. We should be able to tell you that the three ways to read a book are to: 1 - Read the Pictures, 2 - Read the Words, and 3 - Retell the story. We went 'book shopping' in Mrs. Doran's library and added a book we wanted to read to some books Mrs. Doran put in our book boxes.

Our book boxes are special because they are books that we read by ourselves. We call this 'Read to Self'. We talked about what our room should look like and sound like during this time. Mrs. Doran took down our suggestions and then we practiced. Some of us modeled how we SHOULD act and some of us modeled how we should NOT act. This was fun and we all understood what reading to self should look and sound like.

After that we practiced 'Read to Self' by spreading out around the room and reading quietly. It may look like we are talking into phones in these pictures, but this is actually something that allows us to whisper read so that we can hear our voice nice and loud.

Each day we will work to build our stamina and read longer. This is important because Mrs. Doran will soon be meeting with small groups and individuals while we practice our reading. So far we have been able to meet for four minutes at a time. When someone moves, talks or does something that we decided as a group is NOT what 'read to self' should be, we stop. We will be working on building our stamina next week. Ask us what will happen if we can read for 20 minutes straight!

Another first week activity we did was come up with class rules. We filled up a whole chart paper with GREAT rules for our classroom. There were so many that it was hard to remember them all, so Mrs. Doran was able to summarize them into, "We will respect ourselves, respect each other, respect our class and school." We decided that 'respect' means to 'be nice' and we all agreed that this is how we would like our classroom environment to be like. We then all signed our new class rules and posted them in our classroom.

We were able to play some fun math games this week. One of the things that we did was roll two dice and add them together. We practiced writing number sentences too.

We took turns rolling the dice but we each wrote our own number sentences. This was a great activity and we all agreed on the answers and worked well as small teams.

During this time, Mrs. Doran met with some of us to hear us count by 5s, 10s and 2s. We count by fives each time we transition to or from our 'gathering place' and we count by 2s (quietly) when we are in the hallway. Practicing counting like this is an easy activity to do at home and takes no time at all.

For writing, Mrs. Doran passed out journals that we will be using as reading response journals. In here, we will write and draw about the books Mrs. Doran reads to us. She read a lot of books to us this week. Here are some journal samples that people wrote. One was written about the story "First Grade Stinks" and the other was written about the story, "The Kissing Hand". Mrs. Doran has also been reading a chapter book to us. We have been really excited about that and are eager to be able to read chapter books all by ourselves! It was a great first week of school. Take a moment to answer this week's poll question. We hope to see you at the PTA's Ice Cream Social!

Let's Celebrate!

First grade is something to celebrate! In our room, we celebrate our successes as well as our failures. We're learning that it is good to take a risk and answer a question, even if we may answer wrong. That's how we learn! We're also learning that if we make a mistake we should say we are sorry and the other person will say they forgive us. This is a pretty fun place to learn. Here are the fun celebrations Mrs. Doran has taught us so far!

We give ourselves a pat on the back, a hug and a high five.

Just like a sizzling hamburger, in our class things are "Well Done"!

And just like a famous cleaning solution, we are FANTASTIC!