Math:

This week, our mathematicians learned how to tell time to the hour and half hour. Telling time is a huge accomplishment for first graders. It really makes them feel grown up! They learned that the two different kinds of clocks are called analog and digital and practiced telling time to the hour and half hour. The hardest part for the kids is to remember that when it is a half hour, the hour hand is half way past that hour. They often read it as the next hour ahead instead of the hour it is half past. Keep reviewing this concept at home. 

Reading:

This past week in reader’s workshop, we looked at words that were important to our topic. We looked for bold words, words in the glossary, and words in the headings to determine important words. These words helped us learn and teach others more about our special topics. We kept track of these cool words on sticky notes and shared our learning with our classmates. To understand these new vocabulary words, we examined our books for information, using glossaries, captions, and pictures. Since many of these cool words were long, we practiced breaking them into smaller parts, making them easier to read.

Writing:

This past week, we worked on revising our informational writing to make our pieces even better. We added Table of Contents pages to organize our writing for our readers. We also added words like some, all, and sometimes to be more precise when describing our topics. For example, not all dragonflies are green. Some dragonflies are blue or even purple. This revising work is an important step in the writing process and our first grade writers did a fabulous job! This week, we will continue revising and then we will select one informational piece to edit and celebrate.