The week of February 12

Upcoming Events
***WANTED***
Plastic Grocery Bags!! I will take as many grocery bags as you would like to get rid of! Thank you!!

Fairy Tale Readers' Theater Performances

February 22, 2018 

9:30-10:30

February Break 

Feb 26- March 6

100th Day of School Celebrations

We began our day with a special hundred day hash! Students added 100 items each  to our hash, and we ended out having 1500 pieces of snack in our bowl. We sorted our items, and compared which group had the most and which group had the least amount. Later in the day, we had some fun engineering tasks to try. Students worked in small groups to make the tallest cup tower out of 100 cups, then we tried to make the tallest marshmallow tower using 100 toothpicks. During math, the first graders shared their collections, grouped items efficiently by 10s and 20s and then wrote missing number equations with multiples of ten.  Students also did a fun writing and art project. We created pictures of what we thought we would look like when we turn 100! Students created a bucket list of what they want to  accomplish before they turn 100... please be sure to check them out in the hallway right outside our classroom. 

 Last Winter Sports Day 

We had such fun this year during our winter sports program! Here is my skiing and snowboarding group! It is so much fun to spend time with all WES students! 

Valentine's Day

We spent the whole week focused on kindness and friendship. In class we brainstormed things that make us feel loved, and ways to treat others to show our love/friendship for them. I introduced the kindness jar to students on Monday. I invited students to notice when someone did something kind for them. They could write it down and place the sticky note in our jar. At the end of the day, I read aloud all of the notes in the jar! On Tuesday, we read My Heart is Like a Zoo  by Micheal Hall. We modeled our valentine bags after his creative heart illustrations. Students were charged with creating an animal from the book. Each animal had to have at least one heart in it. On Thursday we had fun reading The Peace Book  by Todd Par, and sharing our special valentines with each other. I loved all of my special treats! Thank you all so much!

Engineering in the Classroom 

In preparation for the end of our Patterns in the Sky unit of study, we spent time getting to know the process engineers go through when creating something. We learned the process together, but focused on taking feedback from our friends and changing our design to make our product better.  On Friday we spent time with our Big Buddies and made marble mazes! We planned, built and took feedback on our designs. We will spend time this week changing our  mazes to make them better. 

Readers' and Writers' Workshop 

This week we spent more time practicing our readers' theater plays, and can't wait for our performance on Thursday! We are getting better at reading our plays with expression and fluency. Parent's and family members are welcome to attend. We will begin at 9:30 and will watch a total of 4 fairy tale readers' theater plays. We will have a short intermission and quiz the audience on their fairy tale knowledge!  

We are also working hard at writing our first review! Students are living the life of a reviewer by gathering their information and building their own review. After break, we will move onto informational writing.

The week of January 29th

Upcoming Events 

Winter Sports 2018

   February 7, 2018

Valentine’s Day Class Celebration

Feb. 14, 2018 9:00-10:00

We will have a small Valentine’s Day party in our classroom on Feb. 14th from 9:00-10:00 . If your child would like to hand out valentines this year please make sure you have one for each child in our class. Students will have time to pass out their valentines and enjoy a small treat. I will provide a few treats for the kids this time around! 

Class lists will be sent home in your child's home folder on Tuesday! 

Fairy Tale Readers' Theater Performances

February 22, 2018 

9:30-10:30

Trimester II Grades Close February 23, 2018 

Classroom News 

This week was a tough week for us! Many students were home sick with fevers, flu like symptoms and stomach bugs! The first and second graders wash their hands each morning upon arrival, and I encourage them to wash throughout the day, especially before lunch and snack. Mr. Carlton has a new classroom tool that will help keep our school germ free. He will use his misting wand to spray each classroom once a week in a effort to keep sickness away from Waterville! In happier news, we loved our second winter sports day on Wednesday. The weather was amazing and again I saw so many persistent students LOVING their activities! We have also really liked exploring on Spellingcity.com. Students are getting to be experts at logging in and navigating to our Waterville website. As we get better at using this new tool, I will make our username and password available for practice at home.  Thank you to all of the families who have donated to our penny war! We have filled already! Clothing donations are welcome and appreciated too. 

Readers' Workshop

In reading this week, we continued to read fairy tales. We read Thumbelina together as a class. Together we worked on identifying the challenges that Thumbelina faced in the book and how she responded. Students are really excited to begin practicing for our Fairy Tale Readers Theater Performance! We will be practicing our plays next week. Our learning targets will be: reading with accuracy, making facial expressions and changing our voices to match different  character's feelings.  We will also compare and contrast the different versions of fairy tales. Family members are invited to come and watch our performances the morning of Feb. 22nd .  We will be sending home invitations soon, so look for them in your child's home folder. 

Writers' Workshop 

In writing, we did some fun would you rather prompts! Students practiced sharing their opinions about various topics such as would you rather have hot lunch or cold lunch, do you like summer or winter, or do you prefer video games or board games. Next week, we will begin the LIFE OF A REVIEWER!! Students will begin writing their own reviews about some of their favorite or least favorite things! 

Math 

It was a lot of fun making our class number line! The students worked together to place different numbers on the line. Students shared their thinking and gave feedback to their classmates about the placement of numbers. We even added some negative numbers to our number line.  We were excited to begin a new number corner project for the month of February. We will work on identifying 2D shapes and learning to identify if two shapes are congruent or not congruent.  We will also celebrate our 100th day of school in the coming weeks. We will do some fun activities in class to help celebrate this special day and number!