Week 10 in Review

Greetings from Room 119!  This blog is getting out a little later than usual because Mrs. D. has been busy all weekend working on report cards.  She will send out a reminder email when report cards are posted to Skyward.  If you need her to print our report card, please let her know.  Conferences are this Thursday.  Mrs. D. will not be spending a lot of time on the report card during conferences, rather she will be talking about how together you and she can best help us be the best first graders we can be.

If you have any questions for her, be sure to write them down so you don't forget them.  If you cannot attend conferences, please let Mrs. D. know as soon as possible so you can reschedule.  To view conference times, click HERE.

We were excited to celebrate another birthday in Room 119!  Ethan turned seven and got to spend the entire day (and weekend) with Ollie our birthday owl.  He learned that it's "heaven" to be seven.

We continue to work on our stamina in reading.  We are reading our leveled books each day in hopes to improve our fluency.  Mrs. D. also meets with our reading groups.  In mini-lessons this week, we talked about "visualizing" or making movies in your mind.  Good readers will think about an author's words and imagine them without needing a picture.  Mrs. D. is reading us a biography on Squanto and we've been practicing visualizing what is going on.  We will do more on this next week.

In math this week we reviewed tallies, counting nickels and pennies and solving number stories.  We also took a benchmark assessment.  We work on our paper pencil math work as morning work now and continue to work on problem solving and math thinking in Mrs. D's rotations.  Our awesome math moms and Mrs. Hill have also been helping us really understand the math concepts we've covered thus far.  We are great mathematicians!

Did you know that we've started Show and Tell this week?  Each of us will be getting Mrs. D's Show and Tell bag as well as a sheet with directions of what is expected of us.  This activity helps us work on our oral language skills.  We also have to work on listening to remember everything the person with the Show and Tell is telling us.  We then write about what we learned and turn it into a book for the person with the Show and Tell.  This has really helped us add details in our writing!

Speaking of writing, we are now working harder on rereading and editing our writing.  Near the end of workshop, Mrs. D. has been giving us extra time to read our writing and fix anything that may be wrong.  Many of us are working on using capitals correctly.  We share our writing at the end of workshop so we all know what we do well as writers and what our goals are.  Ask us what our goal is. In our homework, it is OK to have us fix capitals that are not in the correct place.

We ended the week with a visit from our Mystery Reader.  This time it was Emily W's mom who came in to read to us.  She read us a wonderful book called Library Lion that also had a great message!  We were a wonderful audience and all enjoyed the story!

As always, this is just a snapshot of what we did this week in Room 119.  For more pictures, you can click HERE or check out the movie below.