Welcome back! It was so great to see everyone back together in the classroom on Thursday after a nice long break. Our official day back was Wednesday with our remote day. I want to commend everyone for the extra efforts you have made to assure your kiddos attend our weekly remote morning meetings. We have had nearly 100% attendance in our remote morning meetings this year! Some students have attended from childcare, from a car, and from their parents' meetings at work! Your flexibility this year and commitment to your students' education is greatly appreciated.
We began our week by going back to the basics, reviewing our school rules and expectations. Students shared many examples of good chooses that support our rules. It easy to feel compelled to rush back into our schedule and push to get things done, but experience has taught me that sometimes we have to slow down and go back to the basics in order to move forward more effectively. We are focusing on self-regulation and self-control.
This week we launched our next writing unit. In this unit students will learn the art of persuasion, as the craft persuasive essays and letters. We began by writing about our favorite season. Then students were asked to write about something they want or something that is important to them. Mini lessons included using our sound powers to spell harder and harder words.
In Math we had a day of practice and review as I finished first grade PNOA's. On Friday the whole class learned about fractions and created their own "fraction kit" with stripes of paper. This was our first introduction to fractions this year.
We also started our next science unit this week. In this unit students will be learning about light and sound. Our lesson this week was about sound effects and how people create sounds in cartoons. Students had an opportunity to explore making their own sound effects with a ruler and the class created a sound effect rain storm with our bodies. On Friday we we listened to Peter and the Wolf, while students created original art inspired by the sounds they were hearing. In this narrated composition each character in the story is represented by a different instrument in the orchestra. Each student had a different artistic interpretation with some drawing representational pictures, while others made various lines and colors to represent the sounds.
On Friday, Ericka was able to schedule parent teacher conferences for March 19th with most of you. There are still a couple of parents that we need to schedule with. If you have not set up a conference yes, please contact me to schedule an appointment. I will also have a couple or times available on Thursday, March 18th if that works better. I usually do student led conferences in March, however this year Covid-19 restricts us from meeting in person, so these will be standard parent teacher conferences via Google Meet or phone. Students are welcome to join us, but it is not required. I do encourage you to ask your child to show you some of their work on Seesaw if this is something you have not been looking at. Keep in mind this is just a sample of your child's work. Additionally, listen to your child read, and look at some of their writing. This week we cleaned out their writing folders, so some of their "teaching books" went home. I still have their final "published" books in my possession for assessing, so those will not be in their folders.
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