Room 26 NewsWE ARE BLOSSOMING
We have completed our first full week of first grade, and it has gone really well! The children are sweet, smart, and well-behaved. They are very well prepared for our curriculum. We are doing great!
In science we have begun our unit on plants. We will be exploring the different parts of plants and have begun this week with blossoms. On Monday, Mrs. Knothe and I took the children outside to see the beautiful variety of flowers at our school. Each child was allowed to snip one blossom which we brought in and pressed between sheets of waxed paper.

Wednesday we laid the blossoms on index cards, covered them with contact paper, and tied a ribbon through the end. The resulting Beautiful Blossom Bookmarks turned out great! They are marking the place in our big readers.

This week has about learning the routines of first grade. We have begun reading groups, and they are going really smoothly. The children are all doing very well with their reading, and I'm excited to see the progress each child makes. They are happy that our reading groups are all named after food and that they get extra snacks each morning.

When the children are not in a group, they have other literacy activities to keep them busy. We are LOVING the iPads and the variety of very educational and engaging activities we can do with them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have been doing a fair amount of math this week with the intention of laying the foundation for our challenging work to come. One of those foundations involves touch dots. What are touch dots? Well, the number 1 has one touch dot, the number 2 has two touch dots, etc. They are imaginary points on a numeral that the children can tap. Touch dots can be used to add two numbers quickly before the math facts are memorized – they are kind of a transitional strategy between counting concrete objects and memorizing the math facts. They can be used to do pretty advanced math including multiplication. So learning where those little points on the numbers are will be very beneficial to our little mathematicians! We have been going through each number with a special booklet and have made each number and its corresponding dots with play doh. We have completed 1-8. Only the number 9 left to go next week. We learned how to add by counting all the dots.
We also played some whiteboard games to develop our sense of how big and how small numbers. We loved Monster Squeeze which showed us how to guess a secret number 1-10 and prepared us for Numberline Squeeze which will have the children guess a secret number 1-100. We also enjoyed Kitty Scratch which showed us how numbers can be represented by tally marks.
In religion we have learned the story of Creation. We saw this Bible story on the flannelboard and did several pages in our religion book about it. At the Prayer Work Station (we are loving our work station time) we made tissue paper flowers to represent God's beautiful creation. We also completed some coloring pages about the day each part of nature was created.
Oh, there is more I could tell you – we made blossom pencil toppers, number suncatchers, we played some counting games, we read great stories – but I will stop there.
Let me assure you that your children are doing really well and are behaving beautifully. I am really loving the class! Thank you for sending me such sweet children!
Mrs. E

P.S.– Be sure to check out our newly updated classroom website. After a 2 year hiatus, www.mrsensley.com is up and running. You can see different pictures, read the newsletter, check the spelling words and more!