Happy New Year!
First of all, a belated thank you for the wonderful and generous class gift, including such a cute, cute Happy Holidays framed photo of all our cuties. What a wonderful memory to have!
The cold has returned! Please make sure that each your children has an extra pair of socks in their lockers (they might have taken it home before our break) and all the gear they need for a fun time out in the snow.
Parent volunteers, please check the google calendar schedule (located on the tool bar left of this blog post) to double check times. Your help is so appreciated and the students love the extra attention! Please let me know if you have any scheduling conflicts. It is not a problem to change!
As we look forward to January and this winter season, we have exciting learning units coming up...
WRITING...we will be using our "teacher voices" to begin to write informational texts and informational chapter books. Be on the lookout for readers/writers that begin to spout out information about everything they know (or perhaps they already do this well)!
SCIENCE...A sneak peek into our life science unit of animals and their life cycles/habitats will be coming next week! We will have our friends from the Organization for Bat Conservation (housed at the Cranbrook Institute of Science in Detroit) come to share with us animals of the night and their survival skills next Wednesday from 10:30-11:30. We are setting up our room with cozy hibernation stations this week. We will also dive into our physical science unit on SORTING THINGS OUT...this includes investigations of sorting by different properties (size, shape, color, texture, magnetic/non, flexibility, buoyancy) and sorting by the states of matter (solid, liquid, gas). Be ready for scientists who want to test and compare things at home!
READING and WORD WORK...we will be reviewing our short vowel sounds, blends, digraph brothers (sh, th, ch, and wh), and word families the next week, while reading fiction and nonfiction texts, focused on retelling the beginning/middle/end of stories and/or the main idea of the text. We will also be focusing on Amy Ludwig Vanderwater's informational poetry, as this notable poet will be visiting Wealthy Elementary in February! We will also begin our study of long vowel rules and special sounds in the middle of January.
MATH...we will continue our addition strategies unit of addition with a review of doubles, doubles plus one (if you know 8+8=16, you know 8+9=17), and adding 3 addends together (2+3+5). After that, we will tackle more subtraction strategies. January IXL calendar is up and running on our blog (see side tool bar) and came home earlier this week. If your child has finished the IXL challenges that are already posted or if it is a struggle to get them to complete them, try going to my website and testing out other math website choices for 10 minutes at a time...math should be fun!
SOCIAL STUDIES...January is a time to refocus on our goals of TEAM (Taking Responsibility, Everyone Safe, Always Respectful and Making a Difference). Martin Luther King, Jr.'s official day of remembrance falls on Monday, January 19th. Because of this, we will be focusing on making "bold choices with bold voices" this year in 1st grade rotations on Friday the 17th, as well as joining the rest of Wealthy Elementary in a silent walk on Monday afternoon in remembrance of Martin Luther King, Jr., and his vision for a peaceful and just world.
As we look forward, please expect report cards to be electronically sent home at the end of January, as it is the end of the semester already! There will be no school on Friday, January 23rd! Happy SNOW day today...enjoy!
