Field Trip this Month!

Exciting first-grade news: 

We have a field trip coming up at the end of the month! On Wednesday, May 30 we will travel to Cedar Circle Farm in East Thetford. We will be gone for about half of the school day. We'll get to take part in some farm activities, do some tasting, and learn more about plant parts and the jobs they do. You all signed a field trip permission form at the beginning of the year, so I won't need to send home another of those. 

I will send a reminder and more details as the trip gets closer.

"Silent E"

In Fundations we have been working with "silent e." A vowel, then a consonant, then silent e means the vowel sound is long. Now when reading and spelling we have to check whether the vowel sound is short or long. We now practice more than one sound and key word for each vowel. (Letter "u" has two long sounds!)

We now know two syllable types. Closed syllables have exactly one vowel, closed in by at least one consonant at the end. Closed syllables make a short vowel sound. We've known about these for a while. New to first graders are vowel-consonant-e syllables, which have a long vowel sound. We are working hard to identify these syllable types and "mark" them, in our dictation practices, in our morning message responses, and even in the short controlled stories we practice reading fluently.

Starting with Seeds

We're starting our study of plants, with a focus on plant parts and the job each part does to help the plant grow and survive. Today we closely observed several different kinds of seeds. We noticed they were different colors, shapes, sizes, textures-- some even had stripes.

Reading Groups

We're having fun in our reading groups twice a week. Here are some pictures of a couple of groups in action. Some groups are practicing a readers theater, or little play, to perform with expression for the whole class. Some of us are enjoying a taste of the very funny Junie B. Jones series. 

April Calendar Pattern

Here's our current Number Corner calendar theme. Maybe your first grader can explain to you some of the patterns involved this month, or some of the interesting shape names we've learned about. 

Book Reviews

Just before break (I'm behind!) we finished up our opinion writing unit with writing some book reviews. Students wrote about a book they liked, using catchy introductions to get their readers' attention, saying their opinion about the book, giving strong reasons to support their opinions, and writing a conclusion. Here are some pictures on our celebration day when students shared their book reviews in small groups.

Audio Recordings

We are able to read more and more books, discovering all sorts of fun series lately. Here are some pictures of us immersed in our books.

Here are some of the strategy notes from our reading lessons recently. As you can see we've been working on being sure we truly understand our books, paying attention to the story as we read, noticing and figuring out the meaning of a word we don't know when we encounter it-- because if we don't get it, what is the point of reading?! 

As a culminating activity in our current unit of reading lessons, we are working on doing a fabulous job reading aloud in order to each make an audio recording of a book of our choice. Students hear adults read books aloud every day, and they listen to their reading partners. But we also gave a careful listen to an audio book of Whistle for Willie to think about what an audio book reader does that we might try when we read to sound great; students noticed a lot of things, like change your voice to go with how the character is feeling, and pay attention to things like exclamation points, and notice dialogue tags (like 'John whispered,' or 'shouted Susan' after quotation marks). Here's a couple pictures of some students doing their audio recordings with an iPad.