Thank You

Thank you for taking the time throughout the last week to meet with me and your child at school.  Every student has made progress academically and socially and I cannot be more proud of each one of them. This was our last scheduled conference for this year. A report card will follow to show your child's growth in June. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me and if needed, we can arrange for a time to meet.

Maps

Andrew and Cale connected their sharing today to what we have been learning about in social studies - maps! Both students brought in maps to share with their class - one a hand drawn map of their house and the other a map of a ski resort. Students decided to show off these maps in the classroom and we've created a wall for them to be displayed. Encourage your child to bring in a map for sharing this week to add to our collection (or just have your child bring some in at any point)!  We'd love to make a large collection them to explore and learn from.

Picture Writing Preparation

Students in our class joined together with Mrs. Wrigley's first graders to learn how to use two new art techniques that can be paired with crayon-resist watercolors.  Just as we did last week, students are preparing and learning skills that will help them in creating a realistic fiction story complete with watercolor illustrations. Today, students began learning new techniques that will be available during this upcoming project. The techniques introduced today were salt and saran wrap. Students tested these out working collaboratively with peers from Mrs. Wrigley's class.  Students engaged in experimenting with the salt and saran wrap while completing a mini nature illustration. INQUIRE with your child how these new techniques enhanced their watercolor painting!

Report Writing

Students have began their work on the Vermont animal report writing.  Students are extending their learning after spending a few weeks writing All About Books. This week, lessons included teaching about fragments, run-on sentences, topic sentences, and basic mechanics. The first graders in my class are working independently on the report writing after spending time interactively writing a class report and partaking in many opportunities to orally communicate their ideas. INQUIRE with your child what a complete sentence is and how they opened the section on characteristics.

Fractions

This week in math, students were introduced to the concept of fractions. The children learned what a fraction was and how to go about representing the part. We also practiced using fractions with a number of story problems involving pizzas, pies, sandwiches, etc.  Students worked on showing a half, third, and quarter while working with cutting and dividing up parts in small groups. Students also played a fun whole class bingo game. INQUIRE with your child which fraction is biggest and which is smallest using 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4. How would they go about sharing three pizzas between two friends?

Guest Teacher

I will be at a curriculum workshop with the first grade team tomorrow afternoon, March 28th. I will be at school and present for the morning, but a guest teacher will be with the children for the afternoon.

In addition, I will be traveling to NH for a conference next Wednesday and Thursday, April 4th and 5th. Please help your child remember that the same expectations are held for when they have a guest teacher.
Your help reinforcing this at home is greatly appreciated!

Black Bears

To help all students get ready to write their Vermont Animal Research Report, your children have been working as a class on an interactive whole group study of the black bear. Today, students tuned into new vocabulary words - characteristic, habitat, diet, protection, survival, and facts to help them determine important information while listening to an informational text on the black bear.  Students had to distinguish important from unimportant information in order to identify key ideas about these particular topics.  Students also worked diligently utilizing text features to help them distinguish these important facts.  After listening to a text all about black bears, students worked in small groups, reading aloud from a variety of books about the black bear. Students took turns reading aloud, discussing new information, and adding facts to our class web. I was so impressed with the cooperation students used during this activity. INQUIRE with your child what interesting fact they learned about the black bear that resides in Vermont!

NAP and Mapping

BRRRR...  It was a frigid day in Hubbard Park today. Winter has made its presence back to Vermont this week and first graders experienced it as they traveled through a blizzard via a new route to the park. We traveled Court St. to Course St. to get a bird's eye view of Montpelier. We spent time finding landmarks in our city on the way. INQUIRE with your child how small UES looked from the top of the hill!  Upon arriving in the park via steep and curvy hills, children enjoyed a story and song with Amy. Then students engaged in three centers that introduced them to mapping. Students learned how keys were useful in reading maps, discovered landmarks around the park, and did some creative drawing of maps to their debris shelters. What was your child's favorite center? 

Animal Research Projects

REMINDER

Please send in your child's animal research web to school on Monday, March 26th. We will need this information to begin our report writing unit in writer's workshop.  If you need clarification, more information, or are having trouble completing this project, please let me know via email. Thanks for your support with this at home!

NAP - MONDAY!

Our next Nature Adventure/ECO outing in Hubbard Park is this coming Monday, 3/26. We will be

merging with Mrs. Koch's class for a ¾ day learning experience. (9 a.m. – 12:40 p.m.) and returning to school in time for specials.  We will be spending much of the day outside, and we anticipate getting wet from damp forest materials and some mud. The weather could be chilly again, or it could be balmy…. We really need to be prepared with layers. Please be sure your child is prepared for the outdoors with the following:

Comfortable Shoes and clothes

Rain Gear- just in case

A warm jacket  (wear a sweatshirt or fleece underneath for layering)

A baseball/sun hat?

Mittens or gloves?

Water Bottle

LUNCH! We will be bringing our lunch to the park in our backpacks so small lunchboxes that are easier to carry up to the park in our packs work best! 

Chaperones are welcome for the entire outing, or even a portion. Please let me know if you are planning to join us for this adventure.

We will be in a variety of locations, with a variety of stations to support learning about Mapping, and Changes in States of Matter.

We Love Visitors!

Cody's Grandma Carolyn and Grandpa Pete came to visit our classroom today, traveling all the way from North Carolina. While visiting, they read a story about bears and shared with us a topographic map of the United States, teaching us about the mountain ranges the map shows. INQUIRE with your child which mountain ranges Cody's grandparents live near!

Geometry Vocabulary

Our class has been deeply engaged with our current geometry unit. Students have been exploring, building, and finding many three dimensional shapes around the classroom. They have also been immersed in activities focused on sorting shapes according to different attributes. There has been an abundant amount of math vocabulary introduced in this unit - words that we use almost only in geometry class. These words are important because they let us name shapes and talk about them in precise ways.

To help your child engage in conversation about what they are doing in math this month, you might find this link helpful.  You will find a PDF of vocabulary words for Grade 1 Bridges students.  On this Web page, there is also a link to a helpful online math dictionary for students. The PDF and the online
dictionary both show pictures and examples of all vocabulary words: these visual aids are
especially helpful for geometry words.

www.mathlearningcenter.org/resources/materials/parents/parents1.asp

All-About Book Wrap Up

We are just starting to wrap up our All-About Books. We've spent the last 2 weeks working on creating a book that demonstrates our understanding of a particular topic and at the same time teaches the reader something new. We've used mentor texts and our own knowledge to help create the substance of the text. We then used what we've learned about non-fiction features to guide the reader in understanding different components of the topic. Students have had to decide which text structure they would use to help inform their reader. For example, if a student needed to draw a diagram of a library, they would need enough space to draw the diagram and include labels. The same process worked for choosing paper to illustrate a how-to section, a kinds of something, types of something, interesting facts, table of contents, author's note, and many more. Students explored a number of different subjects ranging from dogs to swimming to magic tricks. Be on the lookout for these informational books to come home. INQUIRE with your child what nonfiction features they used to help teach their topic.

Happy Spring

To get ready for the first day of spring (although it seemed to arrive a bit early this year) and to get ready for an upcoming realistic fiction writing/illustration project students spent some time this week visualizing what spring is and exploring art in books. Students then learned about a variety of art techniques to use to create a crayon-resist watercolor painting. Be sure to check these out in our hallway. Here's a sneak peak at a few. INQUIRE with your child what process they used to create such beautiful illustrations!

Change over Time

We headed outdoors to do some science this afternoon with a question in mind. What has changed about our tulip garden and what has stayed the same? Students took several minutes to make observations about the site - there is no more snow or ice, the plants look dead, and there are signs of tulips.  Students also had to figure out where exactly they had planted their tulip. Some used their previous journaling to help aid in this process while some used each other, trees, and windows as landmarks to determine the exact location. We were quite surprised to observe that our tulips had sprouted as Mrs. Wrigley's class shared with us that theirs did not (theirs are planted near the UES sign.) We then did some thinking about why this might be so and journaling about what did and did not change about the site. 

Thanks!

Thank you to Ben, Ezra, and their families for supplying us with many of the items on our wish list. We truly appreciate your support and contributions!

Burlington Free Press

Check out the most recent article about Amy Butler and N.A.P. featured in this weekend's freepress. Some of our students are featured! If you have extra copies, please pass them on! 

http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20120318/GREEN0101/203180324/Learning-landscape-community

5 ways to get outside and have fuN!

Check out Amy Butler's recent blog post at

http://northbranchnaturecenter.blogspot.com/2012/03/5-ways-to-make-it-better.html



Many of our students are pictured and as the warm weather sets in, Amy provides some helpful hints to get your child outside in the natural world!

Conference Sign-Up

I would like to schedule a Spring conference time to meet with you and your child to discuss social and academic progress in First Grade. These conferences will be Student-Led (with lots of teacher support) and scheduled on 3/23. I provided a few alternate times on 3/22 and 3/27 if the Friday does not work for your family. There will be no school for students on Friday, March 23rd. As I did in the fall, please sign up for a conference slot by using this wiki space link below.

http://closterconference.wikispaces.com/ClosterConference

I will send home a confirmation after you have signed up. Please look for this in your child's red folder along with some helpful advise for your family to use while you listen to your child talk about their progress.

Work Places

After a break from work places during our penguin studies, students engaged themselves in some new games and activities today. INQUIRE with your child what their favorite work place is so far in our geometry unit.

Nonfiction

Students dived into learning about nonfiction features today. After learning about venn diagrams and using them to compare and contrast the difference between fiction and nonfiction, students began to dissect and learn about 2 features.

 

Students used nonfiction text to explore and learn about the purpose of a diagram and a label. Students found these features in text and then documented their learning in their nonfiction convention notebook. Each day for the next few weeks, we'll be studying different features of nonfiction. Learning about these features helps readers understand the text and navigate through the complexities found in this style of text.  INQUIRE with your child what purpose a diagram and its labels serve. What diagram did they find in their text?

Later this afternoon, during writer's workshop, students connected what they did in the morning to their all about books. Students added a "parts of" page to show the different parts of something using a diagram and labels in their all about books.

March 23

Have you checked the school calendar, lately? On March 23rd, there will be no school for students. Instead, parents will sign up for a time slot (look for sign up to come home) and bring their child to school for a student-led 20 minute conference. 

Marionnette Puppet Show

Today, we had the opportunity to watch Handsome and Gretel, a puppet show put on by the organization, No Strings Marionette Company.  This company is here at our school for three weeks to work with all the third grade classes who will create their own show complete with their own puppets. We will have a chance to watch their shows in a few weeks. Today, however the directors of the program entertained us with their own show and answered many questions we had about the puppets and special effects shown. While waiting for the show to begin, students sang along with the directors to various well known songs. 2 of our students were actually chosen from the crowd to do a little bit of kareoke. How brave they were to get up on stage and sing to hundreds of kids!