Classroom Times

1. In like a lion… out like a lamb. March Classroom Times Teachers: Mrs. Mills Date: 3/21/14 Highlights This week in first grade we: *closely examined more informational text features: italicized words, labels, captions, charts, and text structure. The students hunted for words in italics, read diagrams with labels, examined captions to gain additional information, read charts, and recognized how the books were organized. Have a conversation with your child about the text features of nonfiction/informational texts. *had fun brainstorming long vowel e words with the vowel patterns ea, y, and ey, identified initial phonemes to make new words, sorted singular and plural nouns, and added the words good, kind, share, think, wasn’t, many, be, and party to the word wall. *started out next writing unit, All About books. The students examined mentor texts, brainstormed topics that they are experts on, developed lists of all they know about one or two their topics, grouped items on their lists into book sections, and created headings for each section. Ask your child to share the All About book topic with you. *reviewed Unit 6 math concepts by participating in two game days (Q-D-N-P Exchange, TricTrac (addition), Base-10 block Exchange, Guess My Number). In Unit 7 we will be exploring geometry and attributes. Working with attribute blocks we played Simon Says to identify the following attributes: shape, color, size, and thickness. The students also played Make My Design, The Attribute Train, and the Sorting Rule. *continued investigating the properties of liquids (bubbly, foamy, has color, transparent, translucent, and viscous). The students enjoyed playing “Go Fish” and “Memory” using the liquids vocabulary terms. Then, the students investigated “Liquid Levels in Bottles” and discovered that the surface of a liquid is always level with respect to the ground. Warmly, Mrs. Mills cmills@spfk12.org P.S. turn the page over… Looking Ahead Think Purple Week March 30th–April 4th Spring Break April 16th-18th