Class Newsletter May 8, 2015 Dear Parents and Families,
Our Oakledge Park lunch picnic is scheduled for Friday, May 15th. We’ll walk down to the park from school around 11:30 am with bagged and home lunches. We’ll start walking back to school around 2:15pm to pack up for dismissal. Families and friends are encouraged to join us, bring treats or lawn games to share if you like. Please email me with any questions.
Here’s a summary of what we learned this week:
Integrated Studies- Author Study - Readers’ Workshop Our learning target isI canstudy an author to learn about their themes, characters, and writing style. Writers’ Workshop Our learning target is I can use an author’s craft to write my own story. We’ve been having a lot of fun studying Leo Lionni’s author’s craft. This week we continued to read Lionni’s texts and examined the transition words and descriptive language he uses to help his readers visualize what is happening in the text, which keeps the readers interested and engaged. First graders then took this knowledge back to their own writing. They did such a nice job of changing repetitive transition words like “then” to more interesting transition words such as “The next day” and “Suddenly”. Students watched a video of Leo Lionni making one of his collaged mice, which appear so often in his books, and practiced making their very own mouse. See their art work outside our classroom. Ask your child to tell you about their storyboard.
Math – Our Learning Target is,I can add two-digit numbers by using ‘friendly tens’. Students applied the strategies of counting on and making ten to larger numbers, this time making a ten that is built on a structure of other tens. They used linking cubes as a concrete representation of the numbers, wrote a matching number sentence, and wrote the total in a place value chart. As they added cubes, students saw that sometimes a new ten can be made, Ex: 33 + 7 = 40, or 4 tens. Students began to recognize that they can decompose one of the addends to make a new ten, creating an easier problem to solve, Ex: 26 + 6 = 30 + 2, decomposing the 6 into 4 and 2. Students also recognized the ways smaller addition problems can help with larger ones. They added 8 + 4, 18 + 4, and 28 + 4 and noticed that 8 + 4 is embedded in all three problems. To support this learning at home create double-digit addition problems where new tens can be made.
Word Work – Our current Fundations unit is: Endings –ing and –ed. Ex: singing, jumping, dusted, hunted, blended Sight words we studied and quizzed this week: called, why, place, away, still Next week’s sight words: high, every, really, world, don't You can find all our sight words to date, as well as what’s coming up next at http://mrsgalushasfirstgrade.weebly.com/word-work.html
Some other logistics: It’s great to see so many students riding to school this spring. Please remember to walk your bikes, scooters, and skateboards when on school property. Thank you for your support! Oakledge Park Picnic Lunch Friday, May 15th 11:45-2:15. Come join us for lunch at the park!! Mrs. Galusha’s maternity leave starts Monday, May 18th. Shannon McCarthy will be the substitute for the rest of the school year. Monday, May 25th NO SCHOOL, Memorial Day Please feel free to contact me anytime, and please check out our website!