December 1st-5th

Hello and happy December!

Last week we had a blast. We learned about the first Thanksgiving. We discussed the roll of the Pilgrims and Indians and even made a few crafts to go along with it! We made stone soup (so yummy), apple turkeys, thanksgiving placemats, toilet paper roll turkeys and a card for someone we were thankful for.

This week we were just as busy!

Announcements:

1. Scholastic orders are due December 11th so we can get them in before the holiday break! Please let me know if any of the books are gifts and I will be sure to get them to you another way! This is a great time to order holiday books. I will ask for you to please not order the "First Grade Friends Forever: The Gingerbread Cookie Mystery" book as I am ordering that to give as a gift to everyone! :)

2. Pajama Day and Gingerbread House Decorating December 18th (decorating begins at 1:15). We need the mini milk cartons like last year! Send those in if you have them! Send those in if you have them! We need 20 total.

Thematic Centers:

This week we have been studying golf! We have learned how complicated the game of gold truly is! We learned about gold courses, clubs, tees, attire for golf and some of the rules. We rotated through 4 main centers:
1. Design your own gold course, name it and decorate it by rolling a gold ball in green paint and rolling it on your golf course to look like grass.
2. Make your own patterns in your golf tee pattern book.
3. Turn a golf ball into something else using whatever materials you need!
4. Choose a fact about golf that we have learned in class and write that rule down and illustrate it. This is a hard one because we have learned so much!

Reader's Workshop:

We are still working on our individual reading and writing goals. We are still doing word sorts as well! This is really improving our spelling. For writing this week, we focussed on writing a brief synopsis on the back of our books like we have seen on many books! This is hard but we are just learning. We are also still encouraging students to spell words based on what they hear when they say the word. This is called phonetically spelling. I would encourage you to do the same at home! If your child asks you how to spell something, first tell them to write what they hear. We learned three new comprehension strategies this week. We are already getting so much better with our comprehension while reading and these strategies will really help!

1. Iggy the Inferring Iguana: Infer as you read! Make predictions while you read, draw conclusions as you put information together and reflect while you read.
2. Jabber the Reteller: Synthesize and retell! Put the information together and think about what you read and retell the story or what you learned in your own words.
3. Fix Up Bear: Monitor and fix up! Think while you read to figure out when you do not understand and use the meaning, word clues and picture clues to help.

Math Workshop:

This was our last week to study geometry. Tuesday we filled out the December calendar. Mastering calendar skills is so important this year! Looking at dates, months and days of the week, we were able to learn many new things about a calendar.

We also completed the sheet "three ways to fill an outline." This sheet came home today. Children were to place pattern blocks in the outlines three different ways.
*The standards for this particular assignment were: finding different combinations of shapes that fill the same area, decomposing shapes in different ways and altering designs to use more or fewer pieces to cover the same space.

Students also received a paper with dots and had to connect the dots to make triangles and quadrilaterals. We practiced first on geo-boards (with rubber bands and boards that have pegs) and then again on paper so we could take it home!

We are also learning the Frosty the Snowman Song and it is super fun!

Hugs,
Mrs. Schultz