Dear Unicorn Families!
We
have officially arrived to my favorite time of the year. Today is the first day of fall! The crisp clean air, pumpkins, hanging out in
the garden and the feeling that school is finally in a groove, all make fall
the best time of the year! We had
another busy week in first grade. In
writing we added more details to our stories.
I modeled a couple of stories and showed how to make them more
interesting and make the characters come to life. We will continue to work on this for next
week as well. In reading, we continue
with our author study. This week we
learned about our author and made connections to some of the books we read. Next week we will use our schema to make
connections between characters in books and between two characters from
different books. We are winding down our
health unit. We are finishing up some
assessments and the last topics for health.
Once we have finished that up, we will start our unit on plants and the
plant life cycle.
We
visited the book fair for a preview today.
The book fair is open all week before school, at lunch and after
school. We do not go back to the book
fair as a group, nor am I able to take your child if you send them with
money. They will go to the library on
their own after they eat. The book fair
will be open on the evening of the Parent Picnic and Play, Thursday, September
28th.
There
are two garden plots available in the community garden area that shares our
school garden. If you are interested, I
can put you in touch with those in charge of the garden (there is a monthly
cost). We will have our own garden plot
this year and starting after the garden clean-up day (October 7th),
we will plant and harvest as part of our unit on plants. We will start our afternoons in the garden
next week. Every child will visit the
garden with volunteers, but not every week.
The first two weeks in the garden will be about exploration and seeing
what is there. Please let me know if you
would like to help with this.
In math we have been working on solving word
problems and making sure we draw and label our picture and write our number
sentence. We have been
successful in our math workstations. We have been working on counting
accurately, playing some great adding games where we need to find how many are
missing, and finding multiple ways to make 7, 8, 9 and 10. We will continue to build on these skills in the next
week.
I
hope everyone has a wonderful weekend.
Mrs. Berk
