"The Old Days"

Hello Families!

It is officially the holiday season in room 108!  We finished studying our own families (and made a fantastic class book!), and have started studying what it was like to be part of a pilgrim family in the 1600's, or 'the old days' as the first graders have affectionately labeled the time period.   We've read some great historically accurate books that tell the tales and roles of pilgrim girls and boys.

We wrapped up unit 3 of Everyday Math.  Unit 4 will focus on standard and nonstandard units of measurement, more frames and arrows, number stories, telling time, and solving addition facts.

In readers' workshop we are spying on the characters in our books to learn about their likes, dislikes, thoughts, and feelings.

In writers' workshop, we're working on making our realistic fiction stories come to life with action, dialogue, feelings, thoughts, and sparkle words!

We are in the midst of the annual Rowe School Food Drive!  The Smart Owls made a goal to fill our entire graph (60 items), and have happily surpassed that goal!  We will be collecting food through Monday 11/24.

Weekly Highlights

We said goodbye to our owl unit last week.  This week we said hello to our new social studies unit focusing on families.  As we read and learn more about different kinds of families, students are creating their own family structure visuals to share with each other.  Next week we will start reading about pilgrim families, giving students a chance to compare and contrast their families and roles with those of the pilgrims!

As part of this unit we are asking each family to choose one Thanksgiving tradition to share with our class.  The request was sent home in green folders earlier this week.  Thank you for helping to make this unit a richer and more vibrant learning experience for these first graders!

In math, we are wrapping up unit 3 with domino addition.  The dominoes are a BIG hit with this group!

Beginnings and Endings

Last week we wrapped up our small moments writing unit.  This week we began our new realistic fiction unit!  The students are really enjoying the creative process and most have moved on to paper with more space for writing and less for drawing!

In science we wrapped up our owl unit by sharing what we've learned to complete our KWL chart.

We made owl trees to practice telling and solving number stories in math!

We've also started learning about and counting dimes.