Week 8 in Review

Greetings from Room 119!  We had a great week and had fun on our Field Trip.  To see all the pictures Mrs. D. took (as well as some that Braedyn's mom took and emailed Mrs. D.), click HERE.

Just a reminder that the Halloween Parade is this Thursday (Oct. 31st) at 2:15 with our Halloween Party from 2:30-3:30.  We have some great moms that have been busy planning things for the party.  If you plan on coming, please contact Mrs. D.

Also, please take a look at the class directory and contact Mrs. D. with any corrections.  She already heard from at least one student who needs to be added and another who had incorrect information.  Please contact her by Tuesday, October 29th if you have any corrections or would like to be added.  She will email you when new directories (the final version~ hopefully) is sent home.

Our "Tooth Tote" has been making many visits to the students in Room 119!  The Tooth Tote is a tote that Mrs. D. sends home with us if we lose a tooth.  We write about how we lost our tooth and it also has a lot of books about losing teeth.  Did you know that we are also keeping a graph of our lost teeth? It's a great way to review graphing.  We have now lost more teeth in October than in September.

Mrs. D. can't possibly tell you all of the things that we do during the week, but one of the things is to learn a word with a new 'word family' each week.  Word families are just words that share the same ending and therefore rhyme.  We have song books that help us learn new word families and we also take a mini test each week on the word family we work on.  Mrs. D. then posts the word family in our classroom for us to reference during Writer's Workshop.

We are learning to check our classroom for the spelling of words.  Now that we are building our stamina in writing, Mrs. D. is giving us about five minutes at the end of writing to go back and fix our capitals (now that we know where capitals should go), fix spellings of words that we may know, and some of us are even working at putting more interesting words into our pieces.  We love sharing our writing with the class so everyone can see.

We continued to work on adding and subtracting 10, recognizing and counting nickels and pennies and telling time.  Most of us have mastered telling time to the hour and half hour and many of us are telling time to the five minutes!  This is NOT something that is expected in first grade but Mrs. D. showed us since we picked up on her first lesson so quickly.  Not only are we able to tell the time on our little "Judy Clocks" (as pictured), we are also looking at our classroom clock and enjoy telling Mrs. D. the time throughout the day!  Ask us what 5 words we need to say before we tell time ("Start with the short hand!").

We try hard to be bucket fillers in Room 119 so we take about 15 minutes a week to write letters and draw pictures for someone who may need a pick me up.  This week we wrote one of Mrs. D's friend's sister who is struggling with an illness.  If you have someone who could use a little "pick-me-up," let Mrs. D. know.  Mrs. D's students (over the years) have written people in other states and even (soldiers) in other countries!

On Friday, we met our new Para-educator, Mrs. Hill, who will be working in our classroom every afternoon.  To learn more about her, you can read her bio on Mrs. Doran's blog.  She read a book to us and introduced herself and spent the rest of the afternoon learning about Room 119.  We already like her and are looking forward to working with her this year.

As always, we ended our week with our Mystery Reader.  Emily H was COMPLETELY shocked and surprised to learn that it was her mom who was our Mystery Reader.  She couldn't hide the smile on her face.  She read us a fun Halloween Book and even brought us a little treat!

As always, this is just a snapshot of our week.  Mrs. D. put more pictures into a video that you can view by clicking HERE.  

Don't forget there is an important Bond Election coming up.  Some mis-information is out there.  To get the facts, please click HERE and also share it with your neighbors.