Book Fair

Our class will be attending the book fair on Friday afternoon, November 4th.  Please let me know whether you'd like your child to purchase something at this time or would prefer to go with them, or would rather not have your child buy something this time. There are times after school and in the evening that the fair will be open.  Please discuss with your child your family's situation and whether or not they are able to purchase books during school, after school, or not at all. Thanks for helping with this conversation!  Also, some parents have inquired about a wish list.  All teachers have a wish list posted on the wall in the small gym during the fair. If you'd like to contribute a book for our classroom library, please check out this list!  Thanks for your help!

C-A-N-D-Y

I know many of your families will enjoy a fun evening out tonight. It was a great seeing many of you parade through the streets of Montpelier on my way home!  Parents- PLEASE make sure the C-A-N-D-Y is not eaten for breakfast and PLEASE make sure it is not sent into school for a "special" snack or lunchtime treat!  Thanks so much for understanding and for helping the sugar stay at home!

Henry and Mudge

We enjoyed a wonderful musical this morning at the Flynn Theatre in Burlington. So many laughs were shared as we enjoyed watching Henry and Mudge. The characters played by Henry, Annie, Mudge, and Henry's parents sure were funny!INQUIRE with your child who their favorite character was and why they thought so. What similarity and or difference did they find between the books and the performance??

Birthday Breakfast

Thanks to the Smiths, Asays, and Lumbras for providing a delectable assortment of breakfast munchies to help us celebrate September and October birthdays.  Many families joined us to celebrate student and parent birthdays. If you missed this month's celebration, be sure to join us on November 18th. 

Five finger planning

Inquire with your child how they can use their hand to help them plan their small moment across five pages.  We discussed how important it is to keep our small moments 'small', but at the same time, make sure we have a beginning, middle, and end.  Students are working hard to include details of their small moment. Check out what it looks like during our writer's workshop.  These students have built up an incredible amount of stamina during writer's workshop...except when the camera comes out! 

Moretown Elementary School

Moretown Elementary students and their principal welcomed our class today as we presented over $2000 to their school on behalf of the fund raising efforts of UES children.  We were welcomed with a huge banner and were given the opportunity to visit their classroom. We were able to see the damage left by hurricane Irene and ask questions regarding the flood's effects and how the money we raised will be used to help fix the damages.  We were also shown a slideshow of their first 8 days at school..which were held outside underneath tents! 

We did it!

We received over 200 hoots in the last 2 days.  Our class has been showing Cooperation, Assertion, Responsibility, Empathy, and Self-Control. To acknowledge our efforts, Screech visited our classroom during morning meeting today to congratulate us!  Way to go First Graders!!

Spelling

This week our spelling focus has been on learning about digraphs.  Digraphs include, sh, wh, th, ch, and ck.  Students are learning that when they see these letters together in a word, they make a completely different sound.  INQUIRE with your child what these sounds are and what word helps them remember the sound.  For example, to help students remember the th sound, they think about their thumb! 

Writer's Workshop

This week we continue to work on creating small moments in writer's workshop. We are learning how to choose something to write based on the "million small moments" that happen to us during the day. We are beginning to understand that writers can write about anything and that it does not have to always be about a big trip or outing!  The students are starting to realize that they can create an entire story out of something that at first seems so small!  We are beginning to practice how to plan out our stories by telling a partner our story before even beginning to write.   

Daily 5 and CAFE

This week, we've launched our last daily 5 choice, Word Work.  Working with words helps children become better spellers and writers. Your child will learn about word families, chunks and blends as well as endings, practice high frequency ‘sight’ words using play dough, stamps, tiles, wikki sticks, letter trays, beans, gel boards and whiteboards, and work on spelling. Working on words has been very engaging and fun this week! INQUIRE with your child what their favorite tool for word work is!


This week, we've started talking about a range of strategies that help us work on Accuracy and Comprehension.  To help your child become a better decoder of words, we've practiced using both beginning, middle, and ending sounds in words and blending the sounds together to read the word.  We've also reviewed what it looks like to use the pictures when stuck on a word.   

We've also practiced what it looks like to monitor and fix up our reading to  help us better understand a story. Good readers often stop to think about if what they are reading makes sense.  They make sure they understand what is happening in the story or what the selection they are reading is about.  If meaning breaks down during a story, good readers have strategies to go back and fix the problem.  This week, our students are learning how to go back and adjust the rate of their reading and then summarizing the text.

Information taken from the daily cafe.com

Goodbye Marbles, Welcome Hoots!

This week UES launched a school-wide positive behavior effort (Vermont Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports program). Simply, in addition to building community in our classroom and helping students learn, practice and meet the goals of CARES, our school is observing and acknowledging positive student behaviors in action.

Students receive Hoots as an acknowledgment of their positive behavior in the classroom, the hallway, at recess, lunch, etc - anywhere at UES during the school day! They are small green cards that any staff/faculty or administrator can give to a child who demonstrates CARES behavior. When each class has earned 100 Hoots, the whole group receives recognition through a certificate and a visit from our district mascot Screech the Owl. We are hoping he visits us soon! Screech came this morning to teach us all about the Hoots during our all school assembly! 

Hoots are replacing the marble jar in our classroom. There is no difference between the rewards, except that all adults distribute hoots and we are working together as a school as opposed to our individual classroom.  As a school community, we will celebrate our accomplishments together!  

Moretown Field Trip - THURSDAY

Please remember to send in your child's permission slip to attend our field trip to Moretown Elementary School on Thursday. I will need the permission slips NO LATER than Wednesday morning. 

While you are thinking about it, don't forget to send in the FLYNN- Henry and Mudge Field Trip permission as well!  This field trip will be Monday morning, October 31st.  Please do not allow your child to dress up in Halloween costumes on this day. 

We are looking for a family or 2 to donate a packaged (ie. granola bar) community snack to bring along with us on each of these trips that is easy to eat and crumbles for the bus. If you are interested, please let me know!

This Friday, October 28th, we will have our first family birthday breakfast. Please join us at 8:30 to celebrate September and October Birthday's!  If you'd like to contribute with a breakfast treat, please let me know ASAP! This celebration will end promptly at 8:55!  Thank you for acknowledging the time. Your mindfulness to this will help us get started with our learning for the day!

Conferences/Open House

Thank you for making the time this week to share in your child's learning. The open house was spectacular in so many ways. The joy on the student's faces as they showed you around the classroom was amazing and the incredible leadership they took in their own learning during their conference was incredible. Thank you again for making a commitment to engage and be involved in your child's learning in first grade!  I look forward to continue to share with you what your child is working on throughout the school year. Looking for more information or are curious about something they do during the day? Just ask..I'll be happy to share! I'm always open to suggestions that will help make communication with families stronger!

OPEN HOUSE TOMORROW

Please bring your family to visit UES tomorrow night from 6:30-7:30 (Wednesday). Come to check out their classrooms, projects they've been working on, and meet their interactive arts teachers. Hope to see you here!

NAP - Leaves

NAP on Monday!

We will have NAP on Monday afternoon. We will be missing our lunch time in the cafeteria and will plan to eat in the classroom around 11:00. Please send in a lunch from home on Monday!  Also, please be prepared with proper clothing, water bottle, and a backpack!  We will be looking closely at leaves in Hubbard Park!

New Work Places

 

Bugs in the Garden Addition

 

Button Addition Surprise

 

Odd and Even Puzzle Number Sentences

INQUIRE with your child how to play these games and which one is their favorite! 

Student Input

Grade 5 is conducting a Grade 1-5 student survey to help UES make changes to the Upper Playground that students would like to see done. Mrs. Parker's class joined us for Morning Meeting this morning to survey the students in our class. Questions ranged from "Would you like trees planted on the hill?" to "Should we remove the big green slide? What would you want to replace it with?"  Student-centered learning begins with an understanding of student interests and needs - thanks Grade 5 for caring about our interests and wants for the playground! You also taught us how to ask great questions/listen, and conduct an interview... ask your first grader about some of the things they'd like to see changed about the upper playground? 

 

Bulb Observation

Before planting the tulips, students closely observed the tulip bulb that will be planted. They used their 5 senses to explore the bulb and documented what they smelled, felt, and saw.  The children also made wonder questions about the bulb. Some of the children wondered what the bulb looked like inside. Next week, before planting, we'll take a look at the cross-section of a tulip bulb and make a diagram of the inside. 

Grammie Ricker Visits

Although her grandaughter refused to allow her to wear her "babushka" outfit, she did allow her to visit our classroom again before she returns to Florida!  We welcomed Sandy into our classroom today and thoroughly enjoyed listening to another story written by Patricia Polacco.  Grammie Ricker also brought in materials and showed us how to create butterflies with coffee filters!  Thanks for your visit and we look forward to seeing you again in the spring.  If your extended family is interested in sharing a special project with us, please let me know. We'd love to have them visit! 

A new classmate!

We welcomed a new classmate today.  He transfered from Mrs. Wrigley's room as her classroom was getting a bit overcrowded!  Meet, Fred, an African water frog!

Invitations and Party Planning

If you are having a birthday or holiday celebration, please send invitations on your own, not through school, unless all students from our class are invited.  This pertains to "secretly" dropping an invitation in their folder or handing it to them during school hours.  Please also discuss the potential conversations that could come about from having out of school gatherings with only select classmates and the feelings that those left out may have.  I will be doing the same at school, but believe a follow up discussion can only benefit!  Thanks so much for understanding. 

Field Trip

Our class has been chosen to represent Union Elementary School to hand deliver the fundraising money our school raised for Moretown Elementary School.  We will be looking for volunteers to help transport students to their school in Moretown. WE WILL NEED YOUR HELP!  Look in your child's red folder for a permission slip and information regarding this trip next week!!

Also keep your eyes out for upcoming information regarding a field trip to the FLYNN THEATRE in Burlington to see the Henry and Mudge Field Trip.  This field trip will be on the morning of October 31st.  At this time, we are not sure whether we will have enough spaces for parent volunteers. More info to come....

From Land to Sea: Understanding Addition and Subtraction

We have launched into the second unit in our Bridges Math Program.  Over the past 2 weeks, the focus has been on addition.

Students have sorted and counted buttons to determine which two colors appear most frequently.  With these buttons, students examined different combinations to make 6 in a fun activity where they pulled 6 buttons mysteriously out of paper bags and recorded the results using an addition sentence of the 2 colors.  In a work place, students are now exploring different combinations for the numbers 4 through 9. We have created a button addition chart to explore various fact families.  INQUIRE with your child what the secret doors do!

We continue to act out a variety of story problems.  When children hear and playact addition and subtraction story problems, they are able to connect and make deeper connections and develop a thorough understanding of the problem.  This past week we dramatize story problems involving ladybugs and gardeners and developed number sentences to solve the problems.  During work places, students are practicing creating number sentences in a game called, "Bugs in the Garden." INQUIRE with your child if they've had a chance to go to this center!

In follow up lessons, students continued to learn how smaller numbers fit together to make larger numbers.  We explored this concept with odd and even puzzle pieces and tried to fit different pieces together to make different number combinations.  INQUIRE with your child what an odd and even number is.

During number corner, we have developed new calendar pieces for the month of October. We created these ourselves using sea creatures.  We also decided cooperatively on a new pattern to display the days.  INQUIRE with your child what the new pattern is.  (crab, sea star, star)  We continue to count the days in the month and days in school. Can you believe we've been in school for 29 days already!  Through number corner we continue to count by 1's, 5's, and 10' and create different ways to show larger numbers. 

Our daily challenges continue to provide opportunities to practice telling time using analog and digital clocks, learn about "doubles and neighbors," count money, measure the temperature, and to explore patterns.   We are currently learning about growing patterns. INQUIRE with your child what a parallelogram looks like!

Questions? Just INQUIRE!

Journey North

Our science focus this week has been on the Journey North Tulip Project.  Students are preparing to each plant a tulip in the front of the school. We have surveyed the schoolgrounds to find the perfect location to plant and have had discussions about what an experiment is.  The children have been introduced to the purpose of this project.  The info below provides an overview of what the children will be doing with this project over the course of the year. 

 
"Journey North students plant and observe tulip test gardens to track the arrival of spring. They observe and record when their own plants – and those in other school gardens across the Northern Hemisphere – emerge from the ground and bloom. As students track this one plant type, along with temperatures, day length, and other seasonal signs, they discover how different factors influence plant growth. This sets the stage for better understanding our changing climate."

Fundations

Students have been practicing their handwriting every day while perfecting the spelling of short vowel sounds in CVC words. They have been working on differentiating interrogative and statement sentences and learning about what punctuation to include in different sentences.  The children also have been reviewing trick words learned in Kindergarten.  All students are starting to shift this knowledge into writers workshop as they independently write their small moments.  As a reminder to your children, please help them remember to use the proper pencil grip and to start their letters at the top.  INQUIRE with your child what letters are, "plane line" letters.  WHY?

Writer's Workshop

We are continuing to work on writing about our own personal experiences, as we did in our first unit of study.  The focus, however, in our new unit of study is on developing more focused vignettes, or what we are calling in the classroom, "small moments."  My goal is to teach students to retell a sequence of events with precise detail, and to write in such a way that a reader could follow those events.  For the past 6 weeks, we've focused on retelling a series of events. We are shifting the focus now to zooming in on one aspect of an experience, elaborating on the moment across several pages to make the moment feel important and interesting.

Today, we focused on understanding what a small moment is. INQUIRE with your child what Vera B. Williams did in her writing as she explained the girl approaching the fire.  Also, INQUIRE with your child what moment they wrote about today. What details did they include in their writing?

Poppy

 

During snack, the children have been listening to the book,  Poppy, written by Avi.  Here are some questions to engage your child in discussions about this book. After each chapter, the students have been practicing, "checking for understanding." 

Who are the characters? 

Why do the mice hold a family meeting?

What happened when the mice requested permission to use New House?

What rule did Poppy break?

Conferences and NO SCHOOL

As a reminder, students DO NOT have school next Thursday and Friday, October 20th and 21st.  On Thursday, teachers have inservice and on Friday student-led conferences are scheduled.  Please see the link to sign up for your conference on-line. By tomorrow, if you have not signed up, I will plan on sending a copy version home inside your child's red folder.  I have offered a variety of days/times to try and accommodate the range of work schedules, however if you are unable to make these days, please let me know and we can work together to find an alternate time. This year, your child will be leading the conference. Here are a few tips to help make these conferences successful:

·        Express positive interest and anticipation about the upcoming conference.

·        Be on time and respect the allotted time provided.

·        Listen and respond to the student (not the teacher)

·        Express pride in growth and progress.

·        Ask questions (see below for samples)

·        Be positive, offering to help in areas where improvement is needed.

·        Recognize that students need to develop independence in communicating progress – the teacher will be there to facilitate and answer specific questions but will not take charge of the conference. 

 

POSSIBLE QUESTIONS TO ASK DURING THE CONFERENCE

·        Can you explain this to me?

·        How did you come up with this idea?

·        How have you grown in this area?

·        How can you improve in this area?

·        How can we help you at home?

·        What was important to you about this?

·        If you could do this work over again, how would you change it?

·        What future goals do you have as a student?

NAP photos from last week- THANKS KIM!

Publishing Party!

On Thursday, our class finalized the editing process by coloring in their personal narratives. On Friday, with our published stories in hand, we went to Mrs. Wrigley's classroom, partnered up with new/old friends and shared our writing with members of their class. The peers took turns, commenting and complementing each others work and enjoying popcorn together.