Thursday, October 17, 2024

Look For and Return Parent/Teacher Sign-Up Sheets This Week!


Parent/Teacher conferences are on November 7th and November 14th! Gold conference sign-up sheets are in your child's orange folder this week and we encourage you to indicate your firstsecond, and third choice of time slots and return the gold sheet to school ASAP.  We will do our best to honor your selections, however conference times will be scheduled on a first returned, first assigned basis. Thank you.

Helper of the Day!

 Helper of the Day is one of first graders' favorite classroom jobs. Duties of this daily position include (but are not limited to 😀) acting as line leader, messenger, paper passer-outer, and retrieving and returning the lunch cart from the cafeteria.




Halloween Parade


Woodstock Elementary School's annual Halloween parade around the village green is scheduled for Thursday, October 31. If your child chooses to wear a costume in the parade, please send it to school that morning in a labeled bag; we will allow time before the parade for kiddos to change.  Costumes should be safe and comfortable for walking, have a clear field of vision, and be weapon-free.  Thank you!

Picture Retake Day is November 1...

 ...please let me or Mrs. Hecker know if your child needs their photo taken 

(tiffany.hecker@mtnviews. org). Thank you! 



Math: Put Together/Take Apart and Addend Unknown

                                             

Our Unit 2 math work continues with a focus on put together/take apart and addend unknown problems. This work gives students experience with developing their understanding of the relationship between addition and subtraction.  

Put Together/Take Apart problems involve part-part-whole relationships rather than actions or a change over time. To provide visual support for making sense of the relationships between the total and the two parts, students played the center game Shake and Spill. It’s also used to help generate strategies when students are introduced to problems where one addend is unknown,

The lack of action makes it more likely that students may think of this problem type in different ways. Some students see it as finding how many to add to get to the known part, while others may think of the problem as removing the known part from the total to find the unknown part. Students continue to highlight the ways they make sense of problems with objects and drawings and annotate the problems with equations: 4 + ___ = 9 or 9 - ___ = 4)



Literacy: Digraphs and Habits of Character



First graders began a new unit in our Fundations phonics/word study program on Wednesday.  Most are fluently recognizing, using, and applying the letter/sound relationship for consonants in reading and writing, and many have gained proficiency with short vowel sounds. This week, students were introduced to digraphs, two letters that "stick together" to form one sound: wh, sh, ch, th, and ck. They learned that /wh/ is only used at the beginning of a word and that /ck/ is only used at the end of a word. When "tapping" to spell or read, digraphs get a one finger touch to represent one sound, even though there are two letters.  First graders were also introduced to four new trick words that they need to be able to read and spell automatically: as, has, to, into. Please help your child practice all of our trick words and challenge him or her to be a "digraph detective" by noticing and talking about digraphs in print and in spoken words! .                         

During EL, students are building their understanding of work and tools by considering how habits of character (initiative, perseverance and collaboration) help us do work.  Students will complete various work challenges to deepen their understanding of this concept.  This week students engaged in a collaborative cup tower challenge.  Additionally, First Graders are participating in a series of active, close read-alouds of The Most Magnificent Thing.  They will be closely studying the main character's behavior and actions and looking for examples of habits of character.

                                 




Thursday, October 3, 2024

Math: Representing and Solving Story Problems

First graders began a new unit of study in math this week focused on addition and subtraction story problems. As students makes sense of problems and share the ways to solve them, this unit will help them deepen their understanding of addition, subtraction, and the relationship between these operations. Currently, first graders are exploring add-to, put together, and take apart problems with a result unknown. They use their bodies, objects, and drawings to act out stories in which an amount is added or taken away. Later in the unit students will work with problem in which they have to figure out how much is being added: 

Diego had 7 pencils.

His sister gave him some pencils

Now, Diego has 9 pencils.

How many pencils did Diego's sister add? 

Story  problems require mathematicians to apply computation strategies, such as counting on, that they will use throughout the year as they add and subtract within 20 and develop computational fluency within 10. 

Literacy: Tools and Work and Heart Words

This week we launched our literacy program, EL. EL is a comprehensive literacy program developed with an equity focus built around theme-based modules in which students learn reading and writing skills. First graders are building their literacy and citizenship skills as they engage in the study of tools and work. Students are exploring how tools help do a job. The G\guiding question and big idea for our first literacy unit is: Why do we need tools? Tools make our lives easier by helping us do work and tools help us create things.




In word study, first graders have been working on blending and reading CVC (consonant-short vowel-consonant) words as well as how to segment and spell them. They are also focusing on capitalization, punctuation and word spacing when writing sentences. The first, first grade heart words have also been introduced: the, a, of, his, and is. A heart word is a high-frequency word with an irregular spelling that includes parts that are difficult to sound out or spell using typical letter/sound patterns.The term “heart word” comes from the idea that some parts of the word need to be “learned by heart.” These words were sent home in orange Thursday folders. The parts of the word that are labeled with a blue square are phonetically spelled, the parts that are labeled with a heart are the tricky parts and need to be memorized.


Second Step: Focusing Attention

Building on taught strategies for listening to learn, our current Second Step social emotional learning lessons helped first graders understand that focusing attention and following directions involves using your eyes, ears, and brain and that the more we practice focusing attention the better we get at it. Strategies to avoid distraction include using self talk and putting on our "attent-o-scopes"!