First Grade News 1-8-21

 Hi! We made it to 2021 in one piece!! We hope you all had a wonderful holiday and vacation. The kids came back so happy and ready to work. We've got so much done this week! We will be doing two units in science through February break: space and penguins. We started them both already. We are helping Beth and Curtis solve a new hypothesis regarding the Galapagos Penguin. We started talking about space and learned a little about galaxies. Ask your child what the name of our galaxy is!

Reading and Language Arts

We are doing an author study on Robert Munsch. He is hilarious! We are really enjoying his books. Ask your child which has been his/her favorite so far and see if they can tell you some key traits many of his books have. 

We read The Snow Child today and made our very own snow baby. We had fun reading to our new friends after.

We learned how to write our own comics and email them to a teacher so they could be printed. This is pretty cool for a first grader to be able to do! We're impressed with their creativity with this activity as well! You can do this from home by going to www.portaportal.com. Guest password is vcs2. Your child will know what to do from there.

We worked with ed endings and how they can have three different sounds. We also used this week's Curious Cat and Data Dog story for word work. We wrote word families and discovered all the words that have the in them. 

We continue to write in our journals and read from our book boxes daily. This is a huge time of year for academic growth. It is fun to watch!

Math

We are working with base ten blocks to practice place value. We also learned about greater than and less than this week. The kids know that the "mouth" opens towards the biggest number...who wouldn't want more cookies to eat?! We also started solving two different equations as we figure out what sign to put in the middle. For example: 3+2 ____ 7-2. The kids are doing great with it!

Dates to Remember

* Wednesday, January 13th is an early release day. 

* Monday, January 18th - no school. 

Happy Weekend!