Back to School Night
Our Virtual Back to School Night is this Tuesday. There are two sessions. One begins at 5:30 and the second begins at 6:10. They can both be accessed from this Google Meet link. Your children created a list of activities and other information that they wanted to share with you. My presentation will include reviewing a typical day. I will also have a padlet available for you to list questions that may have not been covered. After the presentation I will review the questions and share information either through an email or on the blog. Here is a link to the padlet. Math This week your child was working on adding two numbers by counting on. When you count on to add you start with one number and then count to find a total. This strategy helps your child find the number of objects in a group without having to count every object. If your child is struggling with this you will see them starting with one and counting all the objects. You can help them practice by putting a group of objects in a cup and placing a few additional objects next to the cup. Have them say the group number and then touch each additional object and counting aloud. You could also have them make a fist and say their starting number and then raise a finger for each additional object. If you are interested, here is an article that explains the importance of children using their fingers in mathematics. Technology We had our first experience with our new Chromebooks this week. We reviewed the proper way to handle our Chromebooks. We used our Quickcards to login. These replace the Clever Badges that were used last year. I'll send a copy of your child's Quickcard home for those wanting to do online activities at home. We explored our new math curriculum's website by completing a Counting On tutorial and then another day we logged on to Dreambox. This program was familiar to some children from last year. We will be reviewing with Seesaw and Lexia next. Important Dates Back to School Night - First Grade Tuesday, September 28 Picture Day Tuesday, September 28 Book Order Due Friday, October 1 Rainbow Day (1st grade wears blue) Thursday, October 7 No School Friday, October 8
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Back to School Night The first grade Back to School Night is scheduled for Tuesday, September 28. There will be two sessions, one 5:30 - 6:00 and the other from 6:10 - 6:40. I will send out a Google Meet code in a separate email and you can join at whichever time works best for you and your family. If you are unable to attend I'll share the slides after the presentation. I'm looking forward to sharing with you a bit of what first grade looks like for your child this year. Class Agreements We worked together as a class to decide what our agreements for learning would be. Each student then signs the poster that will hang in our classroom as a daily reminder of how we want things to go. It helps to provide a visual reminder for quick lessons reviewing expectations. I love that the first thing they came up with was that is is okay to make mistakes. Phonics We started our first phonics unit this week. Our program is called Fundations. This is a fairly new curriculum for our district so I will be learning right along with the students! The first few weeks are focused on sound/letter review with an emphasis on handwriting. It has been a bit challenging for some of our learners to transition to writing letters a certain way or adjusting their pencil grip to a more standard position. We review 9 letters this week and will continue next week. After a few more letters I will send home a document that shows the directions and coaching language so you can support your writers at home. One thing you can start now is encouraging your child to write lowercase letters and only capitalize the first word in a sentence and names. Book Order I am sending home our first book order on Monday. You have the option of ordering books online. I will attach an informational letter to the order form but please let me know if you have any questions. Also, I'm including order forms for both September and October so there are more books to choose from. Important Dates Back to School Night - First Grade Tuesday, September 28 Picture Day Tuesday, September 28 I apologize for not posting this sooner. I was away from home this weekend and when I was working on the post Monday night I forgot to save it! So here goes round 2 ... For a 4 day week it sure was busy! Community building continued to be a major focus for us. We are spending time getting to know each other and one way is through interviews. Each student will get a chance to be the subject as the rest of the class takes turns asking questions such as, "What is your favorite color? Do you have a pet? What game do you like to play?" I record their answers and then we read the text together while the interviewee points to the words for us with a special pointer. They then get a special clap or cheer - ask you child to demonstrate one of the claps or cheers for you. Students are enjoying learning what they have in common with each other and what makes their classmates unique. .As part of our writing instruction we are learning more about being illustrators. We find that students write more details in their stories when they have more details in their illustrations. We are starting off learning different ways to draw people. You can see a photo of the proud artists on the Photos page. In science we explored the question, What is a Scientist?. Students shared their ideas and then participated in a Mystery Science activity where they observe something ordinary and think of all the questions or wonderings they have about that object. We chose our hand to trace and add the details that we saw and then think of all the questions we might have. Some of our questions were, How do our fingers bend? Why do our fingers have lines on them? and What are fingernails made of? The best thing we can do (to quote Mystery Doug) is to Stay Curious! This week we will continue with our interviews and begin our math and phonics lessons with our district curriculum. More updates to come!
We are off and running! I appreciated the soft start and meeting the class over two days. We were able to go over some routines and get to know each other a bit before we all came together on Friday. What a wonderful group of students! I know we are going to have so much fun together this year.
These first few weeks will be filled with Getting to Know You activities and learning all of the different routines and procedures for first grade. We take things a bit slowly and grow our practice each day. This year has an added layer of making sure we practice social distancing, wear our masks and hand sanitize. Please double check with your child to make sure their mask fits snuggly and doesn't drop down below their nose. I know this will happen occasionally and students have been really good at responding to reminders. Our specials schedule is in full swing this week. P.E. is on Monday and Thursday. We have music on Tuesday and Friday. Library Checkout is on Wednesdays and Library Skills is on Thursday. Building our Classroom Community is a big part of the beginning of the year (and continues throughout the year). One of my favorite things is to have students make a community circle where we learn about each other, solve problems and learn about the world. Figuring out how to do this while keeping a distance was a challenge. I was able to use some of our classroom supply funds to purchase a speaker and wireless microphone. We tried it out on Friday and it worked great! Students stood in a circle and passed the microphone as they answered our question of the day and everyone could hear each other. We were all so excited that it worked so well. You can see a photo of students in action on the Photos page. You'll also see a few photos from the first few days including from our favorite activity - recess! |
MS. SCHIADAI teach first grade in southeast Portland where every day brings a new adventure!
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