Tie Dye T-Shirt Making Sign-Up!!!

                                                    

The next RES school-wide celebration will be making the tie-dye t-shirts!  Students will be making them during their art classes and many volunteers are needed and will be greatly appreciated!

If you are able to volunteer some time to help our kiddos with this please use the link below to sign up!

Thank you!!!

Tie-dye T-shirt Sign-up

Reading Workshop Stations

During Reading Workshop this week student started rotating through some stations.  Let's just say they loved it!!!

Read To Self

Listening Center

 Book Shopping

Read With a Stuffy

Starting Our Writer's Workshop

Our Writing Workshop is up and running!  We started our first unit, Small Moments, during which writers will be learning about and writing personal narratives.  To help us get started we read  Ralph Tells a Story by Abby Hanlon.  Ralph thinks he has nothing to write about but soon realizes that stories are all around him!  Just like us!  So our first step in beginning this unit was to brainstorm ideas that we could write about.  We came up with some great ideas for stories already!

Size of the Problem

First graders took a little field trip down the hall to visit the Student Support Center (aka the SSC) to see what this room looks like and to learn what it is used for - many different things!  While they were there Mrs. Touchette also taught them about the concept of matching one's reactions to the Size of the Problem.  She discussed with them some different problems that people might have (from dropping your pencil or writing the wrong letter, to falling and getting seriously hurt) and talked about what size reaction would be expected for each of them while referencing a chart. 
Thank you, Mrs. T.!!

Classroom Rules and Expectations

During the past week, first graders thought a lot about what our classroom rules and expectations should be.  We read a couple of books to help us with our thinking, and thought very carefully about what rules would be important to make sure that everyone feels safe and cared for in our room, and that everyone will be able to do their best learning.
This is what we came up with:

We realized that this is quite a long list to remember!  So we thought about our three big RES expectations.  As we went through our very long list we realized that all of our ideas are actually different examples of Respecting Ourselves, Respecting Each Other, and Respecting Our Environment!  Phew!  Now we really only have to remember 3 rules and expectations and we all agreed that these would be easier to remember!  

Finally, we all made a "thumbprint" promise to try our best to follow them.  It's going to be a great year!!

Just Right Books

First graders started learning about strategies to help them find books that are "just right" for them.  They already know that the most important thing that they can do to help grow and get stronger and stronger in their reading is to READ!  But today they learned that the other really important piece to this is that the books need to be "just right" for us!

After discussing the "I PICK" chart (which gave us some good pointers!) first graders all got to do some book shopping to choose new books for their book bins!

 

One or Two Fewer

During our math workshop today we started thinking about subtraction.  We played a game that involved subtracting one or two from another number.  Players had to do both equations and then choose one of the answers to cover on their game board.  Lots of great partner work took place, too!

Look at these Readers!

We are continuing to learn about and practice what "read to self" looks like, feels like and sounds like in the classroom.  What an incredible group of readers we have!!