Millie's Classroom News (Oct 17)

Here is a note from her teacher.

Writing

We are continuing to work on personal narratives during writing workshop. The Awesome Owls have so many amazing stories from their lives that they are excited to write about. Writing Workshop is one of this group’s favorite parts of the week. When they write, they are focused, quiet, working hard and doing their best work. We have been working on stretching our words and the mantra, “writers do the best they can and keep going.” They are becoming more independent writers as they learn to accept their own approximate spellings. This gives them more time to focus on content in their stories.

Shared Reading and Poetry Notebooks

Each child had started a notebook collecting songs, rhymes, poems, and chants.

The notebook is an important part of the children’s reading materials because the items we will be adding to the notebooks will be familiar to them. Typically, the children will add pieces to their notebooks every two weeks. We will first read the songs, poems, chants, and rhymes during our shared reading time drawing attention to the connections between letters and sounds within words, as well as introducing spelling patterns. Each student will illustrate the piece being added.

This experience will help children become aware of the phonological system of language and provide a foundation for matching sounds with letters, letter clusters, and word parts. It also provides a model of fluent reading and allows children to participate in fluent reading.

Starting in November the children will bring home their notebooks about once a month to share with you as part of their nightly reading. Of course, they are welcome to take them home more often if you and they would enjoy having it home more. We ask that you please remind your child to put it into his or her book bag after you finish reading so that is comes back to school the next day. The children enjoy their notebooks during daily reading and they are used as a part of our literacy centers.

I hope you enjoy the collection that our school family will put together this year.

MATH

We just started unit 3 this week in math. This unit continues the steady development of some important first grade topics: telling time, money and work is begun on solving simple addition and subtraction problems. Unit 3 has three main areas of focus:

To explore numeric, visual, and concrete patterns.
To introduce addition and subtraction on the number line.
To find the value of collections of dimes, nickels, and pennies

Ask Your Child About

How do you know the difference between odd and even?
What was your “watermelon” small moment story about?
count by 2s, 5s, and 10s
How did you make the apple cider for grandparents’ day?
Why did we chose owls for our class name?

To see pictures of the kids at an apple farm, go here Password: acorns

Frozen on Ice

Sorry, I have had a few blog glitches as of late so thanks for hanging in there. I am also blogging for the first time since October...BUT, hopefully I will catch up before the end of the year! It's just a little busy around these parts BUT, we still managed to do some fun things around town. Starting off with Frozen on ICE!!

Giggles

Egg

We went here for Mat's birthday dinner with some friends. It was amazing. What happens when you let your kids dress themselves. A rare stop in the Tainow family Back home to put together Daddy's birthday gift Finished off the day with a delicious dinner at 6 feet under Makin' bacon on the egg (the next morning)

Millie's class trip to Jaemor Farms

To see pictures of the kids at an apple farm, go here Password for the website: acorns

Transportation Week

Transportation week at Milo's school...And GUESS what Milo wrote/drew about. And no it doesn't say "ohhhhhhhh" as I originally thought. "Those are TIE fighters Mommy!". Millennium Falcon in green. And YES, that is the Gator Van who made a special appearance at Transportation week...which alllllll of Milo's classmates enjoyed.

Just another Tuesday

Thanks to my sister, we have a Karaoke machine. Which Millie loves. And since I was too lazy to take off my macro lens...here is a VERY close up of Milo. And R2

Millie's Classroom News (9/26)

Note from Millie's teacher, We have had a great time working with your young meteorologists. They have been busy identifying and describing different types of weather, learning about the seasons, and recording weather data. This week, each first grade class rotated through the other first grade classrooms for science lessons on wind. While visiting Mrs. Labouchere and Ms. Mitchell’s class, students completed a wind experiment where they predicted and tested what items the wind would move. Mrs. Moran and Ms. Reynolds’s class visit was spent exploring tools used by meteorologists for forecasting weather. In Mrs. Lee and Ms. Camp’s classroom, the students got to make a pinwheel. After all three rotations, all of first grade celebrated our learning by going outside to observe fall and enjoy our pinwheels. Click here for pictures.

Danoline

Danoline came to down and boy were we excited to see them!

All ready for picture day

The next day...daddy had a curling iron "incident"

Red Faces (video)

Braves/Star Wars Night (pictures & video)

Braves Game + Star Wars night?!? Someone was VERY happy! (video)

Ohio for the weekend: part 2 (pictures & video)

My awesome niece playing softball (in the orange shirt)

Goodbye Ohio