Highlights of Learning from the Week of 9/21/20

 It was another great week of learning in First Grade!  We continued getting to know each other, learned more classroom routines, and even made a Kindness Pledge!    

During the first half of the week, we learned how to log on to our computers and join a google meeting via an email link.  During Library classes Mrs. Wood has been teaching us about online safety, too.  Our first all virtual Morning Meeting was a success!  Great job first graders!

We learned about our new Calming Kits.  We now each have our own bag with some tools in them to help us stay calm and focused.  There are some fidgets as well as some other breathing and focusing tools in them.  We are already finding them very helpful!

Our Math Workshop really got going this week!  We focused on strategies for counting accurately as well building numbers up to 20 on tens frames.

We learned about The Group Plan during our social thinking lesson this week.  We read a book about what it means and practiced following a group plan by playing a storytelling game.  We realized that many parts of our days require us to follow the group plan, (like read to self) but that there are still times when we get to have some choice and follow the "me plan".  😊

Writing Workshop is off to a great start!   We spent time in our outdoor learning spaces doing some freewriting and drawing in our new Nature Journals.  We also got our new outdoor backpacks!

We continued learning about the importance of kindness - of being kind to others but also being kind to ourselves.  We made a Kindness Pledge to always try our best to be kind and spread kindness to others.  We are off to a great start with this pledge!!

Highlights from the Week of 9/14/20

 Our first full week of school was a success!  We spent time getting to know each other a little bit better by sharing our "All About Me" bags.  The students did a fantastic job sharing the four items in their bags and telling their classmates what each item represented.  In the process, they learned about many similar interests among them! 

We learned more about kindness this week and how important it is to be kind to others as well as to ourselves.  We also learned that kindness has a "ripple effect".  When we are kind to others, it makes them want to be kind and the kindness spreads, or ripples out to many more people!  We made our own kindness ripples to remind us of this.

First graders reviewed what it means to do "read-to-self".  We were reminded of how to do it and why it is so important!  We got to practice doing it, too!  Our goal is to work on building our stamina so that we can do it for longer and longer periods of time.  I can already tell that this is a group of amazing readers!!  

We spent more time out in the woods in our outdoor learning spaces.  We read a wonderful book called If You Find a Rock and then each student got their own special wishing rock to keep.  We started talking about "sit spots" and we will learn more about those next week!