Week of March 18th, 2013

I hope everyone enjoyed their half day of school!  This week we were busy busy writers in our classroom.  We worked on our "How To" books and some poetry.  Some students get stuck on what they can write about during Daily 5 writing time.  This helps students to remember the different kinds of writing we have practiced this year.

As first graders, we are really working on slowing down and checking our work.  These are the four steps we are using when checking or editing our work.  Students must check that their letters are formed correctly,  they started their sentences with an uppercase, ended with a punctuation mark, and pointed to every word to make sure they have not left anything out.

We had an awesome Author's Celebration with our kindergarten neighbors.  Both classes shared their "All About" books.  Some students shared in small groups and some shared with a partner!

We started our unit on plants.  We read the book The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle and students shared what they knew about plants using the words have, need, and give.  Next week we will plant seeds, so that we can do some observations.

Here are 2 videos we watched this week to help us learn about plants!

Math Centers

For math centers this week, students used an app called Mathmeteer.  This helps students with multiple different math skills such as adding, subtracting, counting by different numbers, shapes, and much more.  We started a new math center called Math Problem Box.  Students write addition and subtraction story problems and put them into the box.  They then get to pick a story problem someone else has written and solve it in their new Math Journal.  At the Ms. Henault center, students worked on adding 10 to a number.  Students used hundreds charts to help them discover that when adding 10 a number the ones place doesn't change but the tens place does.

Our Word Wall words this week were these, other, and more.