Morning Meeting, Guidance, and a special visit!

Morning Meeting

We always begin our day with Morning Meeting. Each day we greet each other, have sharing time, do an activity, and read our morning message. On Thursday, students revisited an activity that is a familiar favorite: Coseeki! In this activity, one student goes to the hall and we choose a "secret leader" in our circle. They guesser then comes back into the classroom and tries to figure out who is leading the class in the motions we are doing. The leader has to be careful not to change the motion while the guesser is looking! We are getting very good at this activity--the guessers are using their power of observation and the leaders are being strategic about when to change the motion to the guesser doesn't see! 

Guidance

Mrs. McCleary, our school counselor, comes in for Guidance lessons weekly. Currently, the class is working on knowing the difference between tattling and reporting. They played a game on Friday to help distinguish the two. Ask a first grader to explain the difference! Be sure to check out Mrs. McCleary's blog to see the latest news in Guidance and for many great family resources.

Community Helpers

As mentioned in an earlier post, our latest social studies unit is about Community Helpers. We were fortunate to have Officer Jeff Fontaine and Chief Jennifer Morrison visit our classroom on Friday afternoon. Mrs. Hughes' class joined us as well. We had prepared questions for the officers, and our students displayed excellent audience behavior. I wonder how many first graders want to be a police officer when they grow up?

A Marvelous Monday!

Happy Monday! It seems that every Monday in our classroom just keeps getting better. These first graders now really have the hang of our routine! Speaking of routine, homework was sent home again today. I prefer to send homework home in the bag provided (the 'homework bag'). I did send it home in the bags of those students who returned them, but if you're child did not have his/hers, the homework papers just went home in the green folder. Please help your child remember to return the homework in the homework bag. I prefer to send it home that way to keep it separate from the shuffle of other papers.

Here is a brief look, with pictures, of parts of our day today...we all hope you've had a great start to the week!

We had a delightful treat today--pumpkin apple bread--which a student brought in as a surprise for the class. We ate it while watching a video on BrainPopJr. about short vowel words.

You may not be able to tell by his face, but he had very exciting news to share about his new baby sister!

We had a "double feature" of BrainPopJr. videos today. Students were introduced to the idea of blogging through a BrainPopJr. video. We also visited the first team's classroom blog in our Primary Blogging Community group. We left them a nice comment on their classroom blog. I am excited to see what kind of feedback we get from our team classes next week on our classroom blog!

Our reading mini-lesson today was about retelling stories using sequencing words. We will continue to practice this important comprehension skill more this week.

I spy lots of happy readers! Do you see them too? Students were thrilled to learn today that you can now do "Read to Self" time in the loft on your share day. VERY EXCITING! :-)

There's just something about that Loft Library...

We started book clubs today! I love book clubs! If you child brings home a book to read to you in his/her green folder or homework bag, please have your child read it to you and then return it to school. We will formalize this process a bit more in the coming weeks when we start book bags with our volunteer reading program.

Daily 5 is so much fun! Students enjoyed choosing a Daily 5 choice after our Read to Someone rotation today. 

Work on Writing is usually one of the most popular Daily 5 choices.

Reading through RAZ-Kids is now something that students will do each week during their Daily 5 time. This is also something they can access at home. See the top left sidebar on this blog for the link.

We started our community helpers social studies unit today with this bubble map of community helpers. Don't worry--students had many more ideas and we will keep adding jobs to this graphic organizer as we go.