Getting into the Groove

I thought that I would take a few minutes to show you some snapshots into our routines that hopefully you are already hearing about from your child!


1. Success Tickets!!! Success tickets are a fun incentive with a bit of luck involved too! If you are caught doing something awesome, you get a ticket! Be sure to put your name on it an toss into our jar, because on Wednesdays and Fridays Miss Young will draw tickets to pick cool stuff from the treasure box! You get one prize for EVERY tickets she pulls with your name on it!! Some friends have already gotten called up three or four times! Some other ways to earn tickets are reading quietly in the hallway in the morning and you get two tickets if you log in your book all week ALL BY YOURSELF! (It's like getting paid!) But watch out... if you flip your card even once on Wednesday or Friday, you don't get to use your tickets. Be careful!



2. C.H.A.M.P.s:  C.H.A.M.P. stands for: C-conversation, H-help, A-activity, M-movement, and P-participation. Miss Young reminds the class of the C.H.A.M.P. expectations for each part of our day. This tells us what exactly we need to do to be "on-the-ball" and ready to learn as much as we can! (It also helps us know what she might look for to give out success tickets and how NOT to get our card flipped.) Mom and Dad, you can remind your child to be a CHAMP at school and follow all the expectations!



3. Superhero Class Promise: Every morning after our Good Morning Boogie Woogie song we proudly recite our class promise together! This is our promise to have good character all day long! We stand tall and proud and give a superhero punch to the air with every promise! I've placed a copy of this class promise in the back of each child's red folder. This is a great place to start discussing expectations for the day or finding our how the day went for your child! For example: "Were you responsible today? Did you do what you needed to do and have what you needed to have? How so?"



4. Poem of the Week: This week we began the routine of learning a poem of the week. This week's poem is called New Friend. I chose this poem for the beginning of the school  year, because I hope your child is making 17 great new friends and teammates this school year! We have read it every day together and I hope you are practicing it at home as well! (A copy is in your child's homework folder.) We have talked about words that repeat, we've talked about the rhyming words, and we've talked about our favorite lines and what they mean to us. I can't wait to see how intelligent they sound discussing poetry by the end of the year! What a bunch of smarty-pants! Oh yeah, and my favorite part- each child randomly got the name of a new friend in the class and had to draw him/her. The result is seen all around the poem. We have some very creative artists in this class as well!




5. Sight Words: Everyday we review our sightwords by singing them to an addictive little tune (Three-Little-Indians). Once we all know them quite well, we will transfer them to our word wall for reference. Sight words are words that a child should learn by sight and be able to read in a "snap!" I will post for you the first nine-weeks' words for your reference. You will probably find it quite helpful to make flash cards for these words (one-nine weeks at a time or even half a nine-weeks). One fun way to spice it up is to add a few cards randomly in the stack that say BOOM! As your child zips through the words in the stack, they run across a BOOM! and get to yell it out! It really keeps them on thier toes.
First Nine-Weeks Words: (Some are a review from kindergarten.)

I	and	said	on
see	go	the	jump
my	is	play	four
like	here	she	not
a	for	are	too
to	have	he	we
five	upon	cold	what
you	find	fall	flower
away	two	one	do
does	in	once	me
he	three	liveh	who
pull	they	where

A SUPER Year Awaits!!

Tomorrow begins a new school year and with a superhero theme, this year is sure to be SUPER with amazing feats of learning and powerful relationships built. After meeting so many of my first grade heroes at orientation, I'm excited to spend time this year getting to know each of them! One thing I loved about teaching first grade last year was the exponential growth that all my students made. First grade is all about growth and it is so fun to encourage and watch! 

Looking forward to an awesome  year with you and your own little hero! 

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100 Days of School!

I just thought I'd share some of the fun activities we did on this landmark day!

Reading for 100 Minutes

(Well, really 5 groups reading for 20 minutes each! :) )

We Made 100 Day Hats to Celebrate the Landmark!

We Counted By 100 All the Way to 2,000!

We Moved on Up in Our Place Value Chart!!

I Can Spell 100 Words

Our Fun 100th Day Snack!!

10 groups of 10 = 100

Searching for the 100 Missing Hershey Kisses

(We are still on the look-out for 2 of them!)

Race to 100 on the 100 Chart!

Answering Equations about 100

(This is tough, but not too tough thanks to the 100 chart and our practice counting by 10 up and down different columns!)

What Would You Buy for $100.00?

My 100 yr old Portrait!

"Pop! Pop!" Who Knew Making "Popcorn" Was So Much Fun...

"Hey, did you know that harpee eagles prey on sloths or that the sloth is the slowest moving creature on Earth?"
"Wow!! I just learned that an eel's jaw can crush bones! Some even have poisonous flesh!"
"I didn't know that winter lasts six months in the Arctic!"
"I can't believe that EACH of T-Rex's teeth were the size of a steak knife! Can you imagine 1,000 of those chomping down on you?"

Today we had tons of fun reading and learning! We have been learning about nonfiction in reading and now we are beginning the report writing process in writer's workshop. So, today we took some pre-steps to researching- recognizing when we learn something new when we read! We learned so many new things today as we partner read and got to share some really cool "popcorn" we made! No, we didn't really make popcorn, but our brains did. See, when we read AND think our brain kind of wakes up. It might start out slow as it is warming up, but soon as I think and think and think and read and read and read the "popcorn" just takes over! Pop.......... pop.........pop......pop...pop..pop.pop.pop.pop.pop.poppopopopopop!!! All this "popcorn" is really all the new ideas I'm having and connections that I'm making!
Reading to learn is a lot of fun!

To encourage your child to read even more nonfiction (and expose them to massive amount of vocabulary!) try taking them to the library to answer questions that they've always wondered about, get a subscription to a child's nonfiction magazine like Sports Illustrated for Kids or Ranger Rick. Highlights Magazine also has nonfiction and fiction articles. You can also read excerpts of magazines, the newspaper, and the Internet to them on topics that interests you both or to learn more about a topic that might have come up in conversation! Exposure to more and more nonfiction is a powerful tool to learning in so many ways!

Check out some of our strategy work as we used mini sticky-notes with an exclamation mark to show where we learned something new!

These are the Third Nine-Weeks sight words. Remember that your child is expected to know these words "on sight" by the end of the nine-weeks. Please help by reviewing these words or using websites like those listed here to help reinforce them:  hangman  or Spelling City. You must enter the words in on spelling city for them.

morning	again	about
found	both	because
shout	gone	draw
climb	or	happy
cow	want	teacher
table	turn	part
now	hard	tiny
door	afraid	always
there	any	eight
through	bear	arms
horse	follow	seven
wall	most	warm
been	tall	ready
fat	water	body
forest	idea	carry
goes	old	kind
hungry	piece	put
soon	shoe	saw
evening	start	butter
near	under	were
	very	work
	wear	person
	build

A Proud, Proud Writing Teacher

Today we had a celebration! Today we had a publishing party!

Our class has been working on personal narratives for what seems like forever. We worked on them for weeks and then took a much needed break to explore some response to literature. Right around Thanksgiving we started working on them again. This time we began looking at model student work in the America's Choice rubric book and noticing what those student authors did well. We took those noticings and the standard to create a class rubric. This rubric became a tool for each child to see in a concrete way what was expected of him or her in regards to a personal narrative. Because of our farming theme, we decided on the levels of performance as "seed," "sprout," and "cornstalk." I've seen so much growth and more importantly to me- EFFORT- in the past few weeks. I am so proud of them and I can't wait to see what they will publish next!

Young Publishing Company is proud to say that all the students' pieces have been accepted by the company and therefore all our writers were celebrated today in our publishing party! Our party included reading our stories to eachother, a microphone, awards, and even a snack! :)  It was a great chance to encourage them to keep on writing and to remind them that they ARE authors!

On a personal note, I've spent many years teaching fourth grade writing, which in Florida means state testing in the form of FLWrites. Every year I push my students and was pleased that last year 2 of my students received top scores (which means I get to go on a limo ride with them in February!) First grade writing has been a big change. Fourth graders write nothing like first graders! Can you imagine? LOL So on one hand my expectations had to change, but the degree to which I push my students has not. I'm so excited to see my first grade friends already trying out a number of strategies in their writing that I've usually taught my fourth grade students. Woo hoo!!

Ideas for Home

The following are a few ideas for extending or reinforcing learning at home. This will be a short list and I will add more at a later date. I don't want to overwhelm anyone :)

1. Of course, READ READ READ with your child!
        A. Your child is now bringing books home with them to read. After they read them to you, if they aren't smooth, help them in their weak areas and encourage them to reread again and again until they can read it as smooth as a sports car. (The opposite would be a jungle jeep that bounces around at every word!)
          B. Talk to your child about the books they are reading or that you read with them. They can retell the events to you just as the story happened. Make sure they remember character names and keep the events in order. Can they tell you the problem? the solution? How did the characters feel? Did anyone learn a lesson?
         C. Try checking out books on cd from the public library! This is a great way for your child to hear a great reader read to them. The key is making sure they have the book in front of them when they read. Just hearing a good story won't improve their reading. It should be expected that they follow along in the book.

2. Word Winner Challenge with the Vocabulary- When I introduce new vocabulary, I will put it in the newsletter. Make a tally chart at home for how many times your family sees or uses the words in conversation. The word with the most tally marks wins!! For even more fun, everyone in the family can guess from the beginning which word they think will win. If their word wins, they win!!

3. BOOM! Sight Word Game- We've started a fun and quick sight word review game. Just write the sight words on index cards with a small handful of cards with BOOM! written on them mixed into the stack. Flip through the cards, having your child read them as  you go. They pay close attention, because as soon as BOOM! comes up they get to shout it out! BOOOOOOOM!!  It is fun and they love it!  The following are some of the words we are reviewing from kindergarten and introducing this first nine-weeks of school:

I	on
see	jump
my	not
like	too
a	we
to	find
and	one
go	who
is	five
here	four
for	in
have	once
said	three
the	two
play	upon
she	what
are	do
he	me
	you
	away
	does
	he
	live
	pull
	they
	where
	cold
	fall
	flower

Have fun!