Gobble, Gobble!

 Hope everyone enjoys their 9 days off! So glad the busy week is done with. All week long, the students had the opportunity to buy books from the Book Fair. I believe the school reached our goal of $15,000 so that’s very exciting. We also had our annual Grandparents Day Lunch on Wednesday. I forgot to take a picture of the kids in their adorable turkey hats. We spent the week learning about the first Thanksgiving, writing a story about a turkey with a problem and solution, talking about the life of the Pilgrim kids and the Wampanoag kids, what we are thankful for, and differences on our clothing now compared to the Pilgrims back then. Come check out some of our writings around the classroom.

We wrote our monthly Vietnamese writing to add to our end-of-the-year book. This month’s writing was “If I had a turkey, I would…” Some kids said they would eat it, go swimming with it, play with it, go to Target with it, go to the Dollar Tree with it, read with it, and etc.

We also took a Viet sound check on Friday over words that end in vowels. The kids did pretty well on the test. We took these words and included them into our writing in our VLA journals. It makes me excited to see how independent the kids have gotten in their journals when it’s writing time. I try to have them write once a week in their journals.

During math, we worked on finding missing addends. 

Mrs. Sklaban and I sent home homework for the kids to do over the Thanksgiving break. Totally optionally. It’s something fun to keep them a little busy over the break. It’s not the regular homework we usually send home each week but we hope that the kids pick 5 activities to do and return it on Monday for a little prize. For my overachievers, I told them they can do more than 5 if they would like!

In their folders on Monday, I will be sending home a field trip permission slip to go to the Zachary Theatre to watch Holiday Heroes. Please send that back to me ASAP. Also, I placed a little red slip about the students bringing in a special ornament from home and sharing it with the class on Monday coming back from break. We will hang it on our class Christmas tree and it will be returned before going on break again for Christmas.

Math World Problems

So this week in math, we worked on word problems. I mixed the addition word problems with the subtraction word problems and the kids had to figure out if they were going to add or subtract by finding key words in the problem. Some of their drawings were very cute. I remind the kids that they need to slow down to produce quality work and not rush through their assignments. Sometimes I’ll even reward extra beads to the student who produces the neatest work to motivate them. 

Soon, we will be adding and subtracting double digit numbers. Please practice math fluency up to 20 with your child at home whenever possible!

One more week until Thanksgiving break! I’m sure the kids are just as excited as teachers are : ) After the break, first grade does a rotation of “Holidays Around the World” where they will learn how a different country celebrates a winter holiday by each first grade teacher. Each day, the class will rotate to another first grade teacher’s classroom. They even get their own passport.

Halloween Party, Adding/Subtracting Ten and Vietnamese Writing

Nothing like having a party on a Monday at school! We had a fun time decorating cookies, pinning the bowtie on Mr. Bones, and make a spider from a lollipop. Thank you to Alice’s mom, Miles’ mom and Sophie’s mom for coming out and helping with the party!!! Our next party will be the Christmas party.

In math this week, we worked on adding and subtracting 10. We learned “the shortcut” of using our 100’s charts and either going up one row or down one row to find the answer. We also clapped backwards and counted back 10 boxes on our charts.

We did a fun activity where the kids made lamps. They got to pick their 6 lamp shades and had to write the answer on the light bulb underneath. 

The kids have been very noisy lately :-/ I decided to try Class DoJo to see if it would help them work quietly. Basically, each student gets a monster and they get points throughout the day if they are doing the right thing. Each time a student gets a point, it gives them a loud “ding” which they love hearing. I am testing out the waters as to if this will help them be less noisy but if it does, I will invite parents and parents will get to see their progress in this Class DoJo app.

 We will have our Viet sound check this Friday. We have been working on 6 words all this week and will be continuing to work on them this upcoming week. I haven’t told the kids yet, but we will be having “Vietnamese buddies” as well as “science buddies.” I have made plans to pair up with a 4^th grade Viet DL class and every month we’ll meet up with our buddies to do some sort of Vietnamese language arts activity.