February 8th!

I hope you all had a terrific weekend and enjoyed some Super Bowl fun!  This will be a quick and busy week before we head into February break.  Below are some highlights of our learning ~

Word Wall & Spelling:  This week we are adding 5 new words to our growing World Wall:  great, there, right, sure, & our.  During spelling, we are working on a review of long vowels a, i, o, & u with silent 'e' on the end.  Ex:  same, trade, time, ride, rope, poke, mule, tune...  We will review that rules of sneaky Mrs. E!  You can see her on the end of many words, but you can't hear her! ;)

Reading: We will continue working in our small guided reading groups and rotating through Daily Five Stations each day.  This week we will talk about character traits while reading stories.  We will learn more about characters by what they say and how they act in various stories.  Are the characters helpful, mean, brave, strong, shy...?  How do we know that from reading stories?  We will also focus on friendship and love as we prepare for Valentine's Day! :)

Writing: The children are doing a terrific job writing about one another's collections.  We are trying hard to select our favorite pieces from each collection that we judge. The next step that we are working on is writing lots of great reasons why our selections are the best!  We will continue working with comparing our collections this week as writers.  The children are loving this unit so far.

Math:  We just wrapped up unit 6 and are moving into unit 7 ~ counting, skip counting, and finding number patterns on charts up to 120!  This is a great unit as we get ready to celebrate our 100th Day of School just after February break.  We will also continue practicing our addition and subtraction facts each day.

Reminders:  Thursday, February 11th is a half day with 11:45 dismissal.  Please send in a note with any changes in dismissal routines.  Friday, February 12th is our Valentine's Day celebration.  Please have your child bring in a decorated mailbox and his/her Valentines for each member of our class.  Please do not attach treats to the cards.  We will be having some treats during the day! Also, this is a great day to dress FANCY! :)  We are looking forward to a fun day while celebrating all of the wonderful friendships in our first grade classroom.

I am looking forward to a great week of learning and fun!  Also, have a wonderful week off with family and friends.

Sincerely,
Eileen Browne