Families,
It was a delight to meet with all of you during Parent/Teacher Conferences. I learned so much from you and hopefully you got a glimpse of your child’s experience thus far in first grade. Thank you for your support!
We have been incredibly productive in the last few weeks. We finished our story “The Fairy Rebel” and the event was celebrated by Ms. Milani dressing as the main character, Tiki, who was a pink, rosebud fairy who wore blue jeans. The children were sad when the story was over. That is a sign of a good story.
The children are all really enthused about reading. They eagerly practice every day during Read & Rest. It is a quiet, focused time for everyone. We have finished all vowels except u and we are on to digraphs next week. We call them “H brothers”. We finished Personal Narratives and the children published their pieces on Grandparents. I hope you have an opportunity to share them with your family members. We started Poetry this week. They are learning to write poetry about any object or thought. We say that “poetry is powerful thoughts in tiny packages”.
We started our unit on local Native Americans. We collected lots of information and data on both of our field trips. We read Native American tales and legends, learned songs, made instruments, and compared our lives to the lives of children from tribes long ago. My good friend and colleague, Mrs. Delmolino, came into the class to help us make Indian apple head dolls out of our dried apples. We made talking sticks and recreated the village in Washington, CT in miniature, in our classroom. We are preparing to present much of what we are learning about Trees and Woodland Indians to you on Monday, November 25th at 2:00. Be prepared to learn something from your children.
The children are working hard on reading and solving word, math problems in subtraction and addition. They have also been asked to write their own word problems based on Halloween or Native Americans, Then they share them with classmates and solve each others’ problems. This is hard work and they have greeted the challenge willingly.
We have been talking about cooperation, which is the fist unit in our Values curriculum. In order to earn a pom pom they all need to cooperate and listen to the teacher. They have done very well in the last few months since we stated the pom pom jar. They have earned a day of ice cream sundaes and most recently they earned a movie and popcorn. Bravo!
They are now working on a Pajama Day. There are 4 pom poms in the jar.
Enjoy the crisp, cool, days!
Best,
Miss Milani