This Week in First Grade

This week, I changed our normal morning message routine.  Instead of me writing the message, the kids get to tell their "news" every Monday morning.  Here's what it looks like this week:

Those ovals are Wikki Sticks (or Bendaroos) that we use to circle words that we're looking for.  For example, I might ask one child to find a word with two syllables, another to find a word with a long "e" sound, and another to find a word that rhymes with "rice".  Everybody gets a turn every day. There are endless possibilities with these messages!  We've been doing this every day since the beginning of the year, but normally I would write the message about what we were going to accomplish in the week.  Now the kids get to have their say.

This week in writing, we learned how to write thank you letters.  We worked on a couple letters all together, and then everyone got to write their own.  That's when I got to see how thoughtful these kids really are! There were some really precious things being written down. If you didn't see a letter come home, it's because your child wrote one to someone in the school and gave it to them.

This week in our work stations, we're practicing ordinal numbers, sorting long vowels and short vowels, determining whether equations are true or false, and putting words in alphabetical order.  You'll probably see a lot of station work coming home.  Sometimes our stations don't have worksheets that go with them, but this week there were a lot. 

We also had a math test yesterday, and those went home today.  We'll start a new chapter tomorrow, and there will be a take-home packet to go along with it.  

Whew! I hope that gave you a taste of what we're doing at school. Everyone is working really hard!