First Grade with Mrs. Greene 2022-2023: Catch Up.... Weeks 10/3 and 10/10

Hello Everyone!

The kids had two 4-day weeks in a row! The short weeks ALWAYS seem to be the busiest! (Hence, the missing post!) In the last two weeks, we have finished our reading and math assessments on the iPads. It's always an adventure getting 14 kids logged into iPads, especially when they're requesting updates and the headphones don't all fit! 😂

Reading/Writing

-We finished our first unit of Fundations (phonics). The students have learned letter, keyword, and sound for 21 consonants and 5 vowels. We are now into tapping out CVC words to read and write them. Because it was our first year using the program, we spent a few weeks learning the letters/keywords and letter formation. This week, we started tapping out words to read them and spell them. We learned to tap words and write them on our whiteboards (dictation). Soon enough, students will be doing dictated sentences!

-I have been meeting with students in small groups focusing on moving them along to the next phonics skill, i.e., short vowels and blends. While I am meeting with students, other students are working in centers or reading independently.

-We have been working on writing narratives. We are practicing planning stories and writing words. We are focusing on writing stories with a beginning, middle, and end. Students are working on saying words slowly and writing the sounds they hear.

-We have continued our daily phonemic awareness lessons. Students are working on listening for the ending sounds, generating rhyming words, and substituting the beginning sound in words (i.e., say bell, change /b/ to /w/ what's the word.... "well").

Math

-We started unit 2, which focuses on addition and subtraction stories. This week, we worked with pairs of numbers that add to 10. Some students are fluent with their ten facts (i.e., 3+7), so they were working on sums to 20.

Social Studies

-This week we learned about fire safety. We read books about firefighters and wrote some fire safety tips.

-During a BrainPop about fire safety, we had an unexpected fire drill! It surprised even me! The students did a great job stopping what they were doing and getting right into line. Many students wrote about the surprise fire drill the next day for writing workshop.

I am finally starting to feel better after having COVID (it took a whole month!) I feel like we are still playing catch up with routines and getting into centers, but we are still early into the year! We will be starting reading homework (book bags) in the next couple of weeks! Your student will bring home a book from their book bin or something we're working on in reading group to practice.

This week, we had a new student join our classroom. Her name is Moana! On Friday, we said goodbye to Charley as she heads off to her new school!

Here we are playing 10-Frame Top It!

We got some AMAZING new books from our Donors Choose project! They are math read alouds.

Here we are playing "Bears in the Cave" - Students had 10 (or 20 bears). They put some in the cave and some next to the cave. Students had to figure out how many bears were in the cave based on how many they could see outside the cave. It was a great way to practice sums of 10 and 20.