Community Helpers Match-Up

Students are learning about many types of community helpers during our social studies theme time. On Friday, they played a game in which they matched cut-outs of a community helper person to his/her tools. I do not have pictures of everyone, but here are a few. Ask your child to name some community helpers that are important to your family. Also, take a moment to discuss what your child wants to be when he/she gets older. It's much too soon to decide a career path in first grade, but it's never to early to start setting goals and aspirations! 

School Bus Driver

Soldier

Doctor

Police Officer

Veterinarian 

Sanitation Worker

Mail Person

      

The loft is open!

Hooray! The loft is now officially open, and everyone has had a chance to go up and check it out. The loft is our "Upstairs Library" and it's open for reading during Reading Workshop, Daily 5 stations, and free times throughout the day. Ask your child what it's like up there!

 

 

 

Vowel Bat!

I hope "Vowel Bat" made it home safely today! Everyone made one of these fun bats this afternoon, and it was a HUGELY popular project. I hope you'll forgive me, because I have a feeling many students might be singing this song over and over (and over) again for a while. Students learned this song a while ago, but reviewing vowel sounds with the song and making a bat to go with it was just the thing for a sunny afternoon in October. I included the song at the bottom of this post for your listening enjoyment. :-)

 

 

 

 

 

Notice the punctuation...

We've spent a lot of time this week thinking about punctuation in our reading and writing. In reading, we added a new strategy to our CAFE board, under F for Fluency--Notice the punctuation. We are more fluent readers when we notice the punctuation and make our reading sound like the author wants it to sound. So far, we've talked about periods, question marks, exclamation points, and quotation marks. We've also been doing a lot of thinking about how we should use punctuation in our writing to help our readers. The focus has been beginning a sentence with an uppercase letter and ending with a period, exclamation point, or question mark. I hope that you notice your students noticing punctuation when they read to you and when writing. In the classroom, students seem to be noticing it everywhere! 

At sharing circle during Reading Workshop--showing how we should change our voice when we see bold print and an exclamation point.

Students found and circled marks of punctuation on our thank you letter to the fire fighters (we used a clear sheet of plastic over the letter so it wouldn't have marks on it when we mail it!).  

Thinking about where to put uppercase letters and end punctuation in Miss Dube's writing at Writing Workshop.

Students unscrambled sentences in groups and underlined the first word of the sentence (the one that needs to begin with an uppercase letter) and circled the end punctuation--this was during SWR time.

Fire Safety Finale!

Our study of community helpers in social studies had a focus on fire safety/fire fighters for the first week because of it being fire safety week last week. Students seemed to enjoy this topic, too! Here are some highlights of our final activities for that part of our community helpers unit. There is lots more to come. Thank you to everyone who helped their child fill out an interview form about your job that of someone else in your family. These interviews will help as we continue our work in this unit.

Fire hat greeting at Morning Meeting!

:-)

Students performed skits to share something they learned about fire safety.

We have some great actors in our class!

Literature plays a large role in all of our theme units of study. These are just a few of our books on this topic!

Thank you, Colchester Center Fire Department!

We had an excellent visit. The students were very excited to be at the fire station, seeing the trucks and meeting some very important community helpers--fire fighters! I hope that the video slideshow helps tell the story of our trip. Thank you to the volunteers who gave us the tour today!

Community Helpers: A Visit to the Burnham Library

We had a wonderful visit to the Burnham Library on Friday morning. It was neat to be there then, because the library was closed to the public (except for us). We joined Mrs. Hughes' class to walk up Main Street to the library and were greeted at the door by Hannah Peacock (one of the children's librarians). The photos I took tell a bit about our trip, and I hope your child shared about it too!

The walk took about 15-20 minutes and it was chilly, but I think everyone enjoyed it!

Before the library was expanded in the 1980s, this was the only room in the library! 

The children's area of the library is so inviting, and the students were such a fantastic audience!

We had some pretty excited readers checking out new books!

Having your own library card is so exciting!

Students had time to browse and enjoy the library.

Choosing just one book to take home was difficult!

What a perfect book to choose before our field trip tomorrow!

Students from our class and Mrs. Hughes's class, waiting to check out their library books.

I get to be in a picture when we have a parent chaperone on our field trip! Here's our whole class, including Miss Dube (student teacher) and Mrs. Martell (tutor). 

Martian Greeting and Monday Journals

 It's a really fuzzy picture, so I kept this one small, but I hope your child can remember the "Martian Call" song to sing to you! This is how we started our morning last Monday. It's funny and silly--a great way to start the day on a Monday morning!

Speaking of Monday, Mondays are also when we work on our Monday journals. Your children will have their Monday journals in their backpacks every Monday when they come home from school. Please be sure to read your child's latest journal entry and discuss it together. Also, if your child would like to add more to the picture or words, please allow him/her to do so (but we only use one page per entry in these journals). I ask that you do not dictate how to spell words. I am trying to instill in children that they should stretch words out and write them the best they can. Correct spelling is important, and those skills will come, but I want first graders to enjoy getting their thoughts onto paper without worrying about it being perfect. Thanks for your help with this!

We sometimes share what we write in our Monday Notebooks as a way to celebrate hard work and to learn more about one another.

Community Helpers: Fire Safety

We are now officially in our next social studies unit: Community Helpers. Last week, students learned a lot about fire fighters and fire safety in preparation for tomorrow's field trip to the fire station. Please make sure your child is dressed to walk to the fire station tomorrow morning. We will be going, rain or shine. If you can join us, please email me (sorensone@csdvt.org) or send a note in the green folder. We will leave at 10:35 and return to school by 11:45. 

Do you like our fire dog headbands? :-)

Conference sign-up and schedule

Thank you for sending back the parent-teacher conference sign-up forms! I have a form back for almost every student. One form was sent last Friday with no student name listed. I pull notes out of green folders and then go through them later. So, I do not know whose form this is. If you did not receive your form back last Friday with the conference time highlighted, please let me know. I sent back a confirmation to everyone whose form I received. 

Also, I want to be sure everyone understands the conference schedule. Students do not have school the week of November 19th. Conferences are from 12:00-8:00 p.m. on Monday, November 19th and from 8:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. on Tuesday, November 20th. This schedule was created to help accommodate everyone's schedules--those who need morning, afternoon, and evening times. The conference times are the same for all elementary schools in Colchester. I look forward to meeting with you then! Please contact me with any questions: sorensone@csdvt.org.