Pajama Day!

Pajama Day

We have earned enough “paws” points to have a class celebration.  We earn “paws” points by following our school rules.  Our celebration will be having Pajama Day on Friday (9-30-16).  Students are invited to wear pajamas but they do not have to.  If you choose to wear slippers, please bring alternative shoes for recess. There will also be a notice coming home in folders this week!

Building Our Skills

We learned a new game today called Five In a Row.  This helps us with our addition skills.

We are working on our writing stamina!  We are up to 14 minutes.  This week we also worked on adding moving and talking to our stories.

Yesterday we started our first social studies unit.  It is about community.  We came up with our own definition of community and today we watched a short video about different types of communities and community workers.  If you have a special job in community and would like to come in and share we would love to have you!  We are having firefighters from the Underhill/Jericho Fire Department coming to visit us next month!

A Peek Into Our Week

We played Double Compare this week.  We are starting to work on our addition skills.  We talked about using a strategy that we call counting on.  That is when you put the bigger number in your head and count on from there.

We did an autumn art project this afternoon.  We got to paint without using paint brushes!  Make sure you check them out in the hallway at Open House.


We tried out using the computers and ipads during Math Menu this week.  On the computer we played the game Counting Fish on ABcya.com and on the Ipad we played the app Quick Images.  Mr. Bouchard came in to teach us about the ipads and we signed a contract promising to follow the ipad rules.


In Word Study,  we have gone over all the lowercase letters and all the letter sounds.  We will be using our Word Study books next week and starting to use strategies to spell words.

Learning How to be First Graders!

We played the game Compare during math this week.  It helped us to learn how to be a good partner and thinking about the math concepts of greater and less.

We built and recorded the staircases we made.

We also counted objects in mystery boxes and tried to represent what we counted in a clear way.

We started trying out Math Menu.  Math Menu is the last 30 minutes of our math block.  Students get to make choices by signing up with a magnet on the side of our filing cabinet.  There are four choices.  They are Math by Myself, Partner Math, Ipad, and Computer.  These choices change every week.  We tried out Math by Myself and Partner Math this week.

We learned how to shop for books for our book boxes.  Students are allowed to choose 6 books for their books boxes.  These books stay in their book boxes all week.  4 of these books come from a specific letter bucket that has just right books in it.  The other 2 books are the student's choice.  We made it to 15 minutes of independent reading!  We are growing our stamina!

In writing, we continue to work on writing small moments.  We learned different ways to spell independently, how to turn and talk with a buddy about our stories, and how to add more to our pictures.

We are working as a class on being respectful listeners by keeping our voices off!

Pictures From the First Week

We have been working hard on learning our classroom routines and expectations.  We have been building up our reading stamina.  We were able to read from our book boxes for 9 minutes!

We explored different math manipulatives in our classroom.  We also did our first page in our first grade math books!

We practiced buddy reading today!  We learned about what it should look like and sound like when we are reading with our buddies.

In writing, we have started writing Small Moments.  Small moments are true stories about one moment in our lives.  It can often be helpful for parents to remind their children about different life events that could be fun to write about.  

Have a great long weekend!

Our First Day!

August 31, 2016

Dear First Grade Families,

We are already off to a awesome school year!  It has been so nice getting to know all of your wonderful children. We are starting off the school year by learning all of our classroom routines and getting to know each other.  

Please make sure that you follow our blog, so that you can see and read about all of our educational adventures.  Remember by entering your email address at the bottom of the blog you will be notified every time we post anything.

We love to celebrate birthdays in first grade.  At this time, we do not have any food allergies to be aware of.  Your child is welcome to bring in a birthday treat or surprise if they would like.  However, do not feel that you have to because we will always sing and celebrate!  I would like to ask that birthday invitations not be passed out at school because it can be disappointing to the students that are not invited.

I will send home a copy of our schedule next week but here is a list of our specials and the days that they occur on:

Monday- Spanish and Guidance

Tuesday- P.E.

Wednesday- Music and Library

Thursday- P.E.

Friday- Art

Please feel free to contact me by phone (899-2272) or email (lily.henault@cesuvt.org).  I look forward to meeting all of you!

Lily Henault

Follow Our Blog!

Were you wondering how you could follow our awesome blog and always be up to date on our hard work?  Well, all you have to do is scroll to the bottom and enter your email address!  I hope to see lots of smiling faces on Tuesday during our open house!