One-Hundred Third Day

Our reading batteries are complete. We have one more day to complete the writing test. Unfortunately, students who missed any portion of the writing process due to absences are unable to make up that time. The good news is many of the students have not needed the entire amount of time allotted for taking the test, but some have. We will take our science test on the states of matter this Friday.

One Hundred- First Day

Today we celebrated our 100th day of first grade (one day late). Unfortunately the 100th day just happened to coincide with reading battery tests, so much of our morning was spent juggling testing with other activities. A big thank you to Mrs. Eure for occupying groups of readers while others were tested. Also, thank you to the parents who donated treats for our afternoon celebration. Some students may not be too starving come dinnertime this evening.

100th Day

Everyone seemed to enjoy our trip to the museum. My group was very lucky to get a marvelous docent for the architectural/garden portion of our study. She was very impressed with our knowledge of the elements of art. Later we spent time exploring 19th century art in good detail. We took time with a suite of Degas' work comparing and contrasting two paintings and then some of his small bronze ballerinas. A special thank you to Mrs. Sterling who accompanied us to the museum and really helped to make our trip go smoothly.

Unit 4 Week 1 Preview

Our new theme for this unit is teamwork. We will begin the unit discussing the advantages of using teamwork and what team members do. This week we will use the spelling rules: 'ai_', and '_ay' to spell the long vowel-a. For comprehension we will learn how to generate questions during reading in order to make predictions. We will discuss comparatives and superlatives and use them to make a small fold out book. Our vocabulary words will be: encourage, friendship, relationship, rely, and suggest. Our sight words will be: across, carry, eight, once, upon, and walked. In grammar we will distinguish between the two verbs: was and were.

In health, we will talk about safety and safe habits.

Additionally, this week all 1st graders will take their reading skills battery for fluency and comprehension.

We will also attempt to get in a math test.

On Wednesday is our field study trip to the Getty Museum. We will be enjoying as well as examining and comparing art for a variety of elements: line, color, texture, shape, and subject matter.

This will be a busy week with Our 1ooth day of school celebration on Thursday.

Hundredth Day of School

We will be celebrating the 100th day of our 1st grade year on Feb. 23rd 2012. Our traditional celebration has been downsized in recent years due to administrative constraints, but we still celebrate with afternoon treat sharing and games to mark the occasion. If you would like to send treats along with your child to share with the class for Thursday afternoon it would be appreciated.

Ninety-Second Day

Creeping up on the 100th day of school, we have already passed the half-way point. Today we read poems with figurative language written by Kindergarten and 1st grade aged students. We then tried our hand at writing our own poems in order to "paint a picture with words."

We completed our 2nd quarterly district math exam yesterday. Two students passed with a perfect score. Fourteen students passed missing only 1 or 2 questions on the objective portion. All students met at least the minimum criteria on the objective portion of the exam.

Unit 3 Week 5 Preview

This week we will analyze text structure in order to use our comprehension skill, compare and contrast. We will compare children from all parts of the world to find similarities and differences in their daily activities. Our vocabulary words are: culture, custom, language, similar, and skill. Our high frequency words will be: any, boy, by, does, friend, girl, and water. We will spell words which begin with 3 consonants. We will examine short-vowel verbs which require double consonants to be added with inflectional endings.

We will continue our work writing descriptive sentences first using a Tree Map to record sensory details. We will make our first Double Bubble Map and a Venn Diagram to compare and contrast two things.

Eighty-Seventh Day

We had an interesting conversation about Goldilocks. We found her to be resourceful (able to solve her problems of tiredness and hunger) but unwise. We also discussed recycling, reusing, and repurposing.

We took topic 12 math test today. When all are finished, scores will be posted.

We will likely go ahead and take our social studies geography test tomorrow.