Miss Hutchison's Class Blog

Notes for Parents:

• Our class is going to publish a book! Yes, you read that correctly! We are publishing our own hard-cover & bound class book. The kids have been working so hard on drafting, writing, and illustrating their pages in the book, entitled “When We Grow Up.” (This would be a great keepsake for graduation one day!) If you would like to order a copy of the book, please follow this link to do so. A paper order form also came home with your child before break. All orders are due by April 14. (We do have some students in our class who would benefit from being gifted a copy of our class book. My hope is for each child to have a copy. If you are interested, this is an option on the online order form.)

 

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CELEBRATIONS

Top Frog – We had four “Top Frogs” (star students) in our classroom this week: Kenzie, Landon, Eli, and Greta! For this round, the top frog gets to choose our “magic word” for the day! Plus, the top frog is our door holder and line leader. 

Pizza Party – Thank you to Eli’s mom for donating a pizza party for our class on Thursday as part of our celebration for Miss Fewell and for our last day before spring break! 

Miss Fewell’s GLOW-bye party – We  had so much fun celebrating Miss Fewell with her Glow-bye party on Thursday! We made her a class book about how to be a teacher, made her a special video, and shared lots of fun memories! 

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OUR LEARNING:

Reading– While we got to know our characters better this week we looked for clues to make our acting just right, imagined new endings to stories, and thought about the audience we were reading to. It has been a great March is Reading Month! We enjoyed celebrating with your children and can’t believe all the growth they have shown.

Writing – To wrap up our persuasive writing unit, students got to choose their favorite persuasive letter to send to someone! If your child wrote to you, feel free to write back to them. 

Math – This week we took our Unit 5 test! It was a tricky unit for our kiddos with a lot of different skills mixed in. Please take some time to look over the questions to gain a better idea of where your child is at. Keep practicing tens and ones at home! After break, we will be starting Unit 6: Comparisons and Data.

Word Study – This week tried to learn from our bloopers when we read. We Focused on the mistakes we make when we read. We also tried to think of ways to memorize our snap words like Father And Mother, I Love You = family!

Holi  – On Monday, we celebrated Holi, which is the festival of colors in India. We made colorful watercolors using coffee filters and read a book about the holiday. 

Spring Fling – We celebrated spring break with some special activities on Thursday. We played Spring BINGO, did a bunny drawing, and enjoyed some spring movement activities. 

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Upcoming Dates:

• Monday, April 12 – ART
• Tuesday, April 13 – STEAM
• Wednesday, April 14 – MUSIC, Library, return Book Publishing form, even if you don’t plan to order! 
• Thursday, April 15 – PE
• Friday, April 16 – ART

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Books We’ve Read Together:

This order form for our published books came home with your child yesterday. It is completely optional to order a copy of our book, but PLEASE return the form even if you’re not planning to order. Simply check the gray “NO” box at the bottom and return the form to school.

If you ordered online, please write the authorization code from your confirmation email on this form and return it to school.

In order to publish our book, we are required to have a returned form from each student.

Please return these forms to school by April 14. Thank you for helping with this!!

Notes for Parents:

• March is Reading Month is almost finished! Please send your child’s GREEN READING LOG back to school on Monday so they can earn a raffle ticket for their weekly reading! It’ll come back home with them on Monday afternoon. 🙂 We will have our final classroom awards for most reading minutes on the Monday after spring break!
• Our class is going to publish a book! Yes, you read that correctly! We are publishing our own hard-cover & bound class book. The kids have been working so hard on drafting, writing, and illustrating their pages in the book, entitled “When We Grow Up.” (This would be a great keepsake for graduation one day!) If you would like to order a copy of the book, please follow this link to do so. A paper order form is also coming home with your child tomorrow. All orders are due by April 14. (We do have some students in our class who would benefit from being gifted a copy of our class book. My hope is for each child to have a copy. If you are interested, this is an option on the online order form.)

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CELEBRATIONS

Top Frog – We had three “Top Frogs” (star students) in our classroom this week: Kylie, Reese M., and Hailey! For this round, the top frog gets to choose our “magic word” for the day! Plus, the top frog is our door holder and line leader. 

Quote of the Week – This week’s quote went to KYLIE for always being up for a challenge. 

First Grade Family Time – Here are the photos of this week’s award winning first graders! 

Reading Reward – 30 MINUTES OF QUIET READING A room full of 25 first graders all quietly focused on books during their independent reading time for 30 minutes straight? YEP, WE DID THAT! Our class has been working all year long to build up our reading stamina, and we’ve reached our biggest milestone yet! To celebrate, the class voted to have an ice cream party with bookworms as toppings.

Mystery Readers – We had lots of mystery readers in our classroom this week for March is Reading Month. First, Bella, a second grade former student of mine, read to our class. Then, Mrs. Elders, our first grade parapro surprised our class. Finally, on Friday, Ben’s mom surprised him as our mystery reader! 

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OUR LEARNING:

Reading– We spent lots of our reading time this week drafting and writing our book! Plus, this week while getting to know our characters we: imagined what characters might say by using the pictures, worked to smooth out our voices, and tried putting ourselves in the character’s shoes.

Writing – This week, students practiced editing their persuasive letters. We practiced rereading and asking ourselves, “Does it make sense?”, correcting our capital letters and punctuation, using the word wall to spell snap words correctly, and stretching out the sounds in tricky words. Students were so excited to send a letter home to YOU this week, too! 

Math – We practiced writing our numbers up to 120 on a grid to help us figure out what would be 10 more or 10 less than a given number. We also learned how to add and subtract multiples of ten. The kiddos took their second quiz, and we will be finishing this unit before we leave for spring break!

Word Study – We spent this week learning all about bossy “r.” When r is right after a vowel sound, it changes the sound to something completely different! We learned that sometimes, er/ir/ur all sound the same, too.

Technology – Our classroom is officially one-to-one with devices! We got a class cart of Chromebooks last week, and we’ve been exploring some new technology features to enhance our learning. We learned how to type an answer to a question posted in Google Classroom and we tried out a new math game called Prodigy. 

Social Emotional – We started a new unit this week, which is focused on how to be a good citizen! Students played games and acted out some ways to be good citizens at school and at home. 

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Upcoming Dates:

• Monday, March 29 – ART, bring GREEN READING LOGS back to school for a raffle ticket! 
• Tuesday, March 30 – STEAM
• Wednesday, March 31 – MUSIC, Library
• Thursday, April 1 – PE, Miss Fewell’s Last Day Celebration! 
• Friday, April 2 – Sunday, April 11 – SPRING BREAK! 

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Books We’ve Read Together:

Notes for Parents:

• March is Reading Month is well underway! Please send your child’s GREEN READING LOG back to school on Monday so they can earn a raffle ticket for their weekly reading! It’ll come back home with them on Monday afternoon. 🙂 

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CELEBRATIONS

Top Frog – We had five “Top Frogs” (star students) in our classroom this week: Macon, Anna, Sloane, Lilly, and Brielle! For this round, the top frog gets to sit anywhere they want in the classroom for the day! Plus, the top frog is our door holder and line leader. 

Quote of the Week – This week’s quote went to GRETA for looking for the good qualities in others.

First Grade Family Time – Here are the photos of this week’s award winning first graders! 

St. Patrick’s Day – UH OH, THOSE SILLY LEPRECHAUNS! Our class came in on Wednesday morning to find that our room was a total green mess! The custodians wrote us a note telling us that we needed to be more clean and not make messes like these. Our first graders had to work together to write a persuasive letter to our custodians explaining that the leprechauns caused the St. Patrick’s Day mess, not us!

We took some time to learn about gratitude on St. Patrick’s day by thinking about why we’re LUCKY to have each person in our classroom family. Miss Fewell and Miss Hutchison kicked us off by showing this slideshow that highlights a special quality about each first grader. Then, students picked another classmate’s name from a basket and wrote them a super secret letter about why we’re lucky to know them. We shared these in a big circle later in the day, and I may have been holding back tears. “Lucky” is an understatement for my gratitude for teaching these kids. 

We are some “Cerealsly Lucky” first graders!

 

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OUR LEARNING:

Reading– In reading as we worked on continuing to get to know our characters we paid close attention to the end, worked to use all the pages of the story, matched our voices and body gestures to the feelings while we read, and thought about what was happening while we were reading.

Writing – This week we continued our persuasive letter writing unit. Students began writing their own letters asking for permission to cook dinner at home, new books for our classroom library, and more!

Math – We continued working with story problems, and we focused on how the unknown number can vary from problem to problem. They were also introduced to problems with three addends (partners). This is a tricky skill that we will continue to build on!

Word Study – We started learning about bloopers we might make while writing tricky words. Bloopers are actually GREAT for us, because we learn from our mistakes! We also started learning about bossy R and the way it changes vowel sounds (ar, er, ir, or, ur).

Social Emotional – We wrapped up our unit on sportsmanship this week! We’re ready to be good sports on the playground and on our sports teams. Just in time for spring sports to begin. 🙂 

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Upcoming Dates:

• Monday, March 22 – PE, bring GREEN READING LOGS back to school for a raffle ticket! 
• Tuesday, March 23 – ART
• Wednesday, March 24 – STEAM, Library
• Thursday, March 25 – MUSIC
• Friday, March 26 – PE

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Books We’ve Read Together:

We had such a great day celebrating Joshua and learning about Down Syndrome today! Here are a few snippets from our day. 

First, Miss Hutchison made this slideshow to share with all of Georgetown earlier this week. Many other classrooms “Rocked Their Socks” today, too! 

Next, we’ve spent the past few days reading lots of books about Down Syndrome to learn more about Joshua’s super abilities. Here are just a few of our favorite reads. Most of these books were donated to our classroom by Joshua’s family – thank you so much!! 

Today, we did some activities to really try to experience what some parts of the school day are like for our friends with Down Syndrome. We gave lots of extra hugs and love to one another today, just like Joshua loves to do! 

Notes for Parents:

• March is Reading Month is well underway! Please send your child’s GREEN READING LOG back to school on Monday so they can earn a raffle ticket for their weekly reading! It’ll come back home with them on Monday afternoon. 🙂 
• Thank you so much for taking the time to attend parent teacher conferences this week! Your child’s writing papers and math tests came home in their blue folder after your conference.
• Next Friday, we will celebrate Down Syndrome Awareness Day by “Rocking our Socks.” We will spend the day celebrating Joshua and learning about his superpowers! Please have your child wear crazy socks on Friday. 🙂 

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CELEBRATIONS

Top Frog – We had five “Top Frogs” (star students) in our classroom this week: Kylie, Keegan, Mason, Logan, and Katelyn! For this round, the top frog gets to sit anywhere they want in the classroom for the day! Plus, the top frog is our door holder and line leader. 

Quote of the Week – This week’s quote went to HUDSON for his willingness to care for his classmates!

First Grade Family Time – Here are the photos of this week’s award winning first graders! 

Visit with Finn – Miss Hutchison’s puppy, Finn, came to visit our class on the playground on Friday. The class absolutely loved getting to meet him!!  

Door Decorations – As part of our March is Reading Month celebration at school, we had a “Wild West” door and hallway decorating competition. Our first graders are excited to get stuck on new books and saddle up to read! 

 

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OUR LEARNING:

Reading– We are starting a new fiction reading unit this week. This unit is all about getting to know the characters in our books. We practiced taking a sneak peek to get to know the characters, worked on looking for important characters, and worked to understand our character’s feelings by looking at facial expressions, body language, and gestures.

Writing – We finished our book review “book battles” this week! The book champion was Pippi Longstocking. Then, we began our Persuasive Writing unit this week! Our class worked together to write a letter to Mr. Waldie & Miss Hutchison asking for a class pet. (Uh oh! They’re really passionate about this!!) We practiced using a greeting, topic sentence, three reasons, a mini moment, conclusion, and closing in our letter.

Math – This week we started Unit 5. We worked on solving story problems with unknown partners using teen numbers and reminded students of the make-a-ten strategy.  We focused on using whatever strategy best helps them solve these problems- math mountains, scooping and counting up (or down), and/or making a ten.

Word Study – We added /aw/, /au/, and /igh/ to our vowel teams chart. Then we wrapped up Unit 4- Word Builders by building Vowel Town.  The kids had a lot of fun with this!   Help your child hunt for these sounds when s/he is reading!

Social Emotional – We wrapped up our unit on sportsmanship this week! We’re ready to be good sports on the playground and on our sports teams. Just in time for spring sports to begin. 🙂 

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Upcoming Dates:

• Monday, March 15 – MUSIC, bring GREEN READING LOGS back to school for a raffle ticket! 
• Tuesday, March 16 – PE
• Wednesday, March 17 – ART, Library, Wear green for St. Patrick’s day
• Thursday, March 18 – STEAM
• Friday, March 19 – MUSIC, Rock your socks! Wear crazy socks!

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Books We’ve Read Together:

Tomorrow is our class’ official book fair shopping day! If you would like to add money to your child’s e-wallet for the book fair, you may do so here. Shopping will also be open on Thursday, too! 

We had a BLAST spending the day as basketball players! Thank you so much to those of you who donated items to help make this day possible. The excitement and wonder on these kids’ faces when they walk into the classroom on these “surprise days” are truly amazing!

 

To see all of the pictures from our March Madness day or to download any of them, click here.

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Classroom Transformation

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Soft Start

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Introducing our teams as they ran onto the basketball court: Fewell Fire & Hutchison Hoops! All throughout the day, students got the chance to shoot a basket to earn points for their team. We checked the final score at the end of the day!

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Watching behind-the-scenes videos from REAL basketball players. Miss Fewell’s roommates and housemates are Hope College basketball players, so they gave us a tour of their court and locker room, then we watched some of their highlight reel from this season.  

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We made our own March Madness bookmarks for March is Reading Month! 

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We had some “halftime” snacks from our concession stand! We enjoyed some clementine and cheese puff basketballs & gatorade. 

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After music, we read one of our favorite basketball books about Michael Jordan called “Salt in his Shoes.”

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Next, we checked out our book bracket from our previous book reviews. We voted from the Elite 8 books to the Final 2! Then, students started writing their FINAL book review to convince us of which book should be the winner of our book bracket! We also voted for the winning book and cast our ballots. 

Notes for Parents:

• March is Reading Month is well underway! Please send your child’s GREEN READING LOG back to school on Monday so they can earn a raffle ticket for their weekly reading! It’ll come back home with them on Monday afternoon. 🙂 
• Parent teacher conferences will be held via Zoom this week. If you haven’t had the chance to sign up for a conference time yet, please do so as soon as possible. Thank you! 

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CELEBRATIONS

Top Frog – We had four “Top Frogs” (star students) in our classroom this week: Landon, Kenzie, Hailey, and Reese M.! For this round, the top frog gets to sit anywhere they want in the classroom for the day! Plus, the top frog is our door holder and line leader. 

Quote of the Week – This week’s quote went to KATELYN for her love of reading!

First Grade Family Time – Here are the photos of this week’s award winning first graders! 

Mystery Reader – Sloane’s sister Lyla surprised our class as the mystery reader this week. She read an Elephant & Piggie book to us – we love that series!! 

Birthdays – We celebrated Hailey’s 7th birthday this week!

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – After reading the book and watching the movie last week, we took a little time to make a Venn Diagram comparing the book & movie. While we worked on our comparisons, we enjoyed some “Everlasting Gobstoppers” from Miss Hutchison! 

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OUR LEARNING:

Reading– We wrapped up Unit 3 this week.  We have learned so many tools for understanding our books.  Our last focus was on sounding like a “Reading Star.” We are also so excited for all our special March is Reading Month events.  We encourage you to find fun ways to read with your child at home to “mix it up” this month. Read to a stuffy, flashlight read, FaceTime a relative to read them a story, find something fun to help beat the end of winter blues!

Writing – We continued our book review “book battles” this week! Little did the students know, but these book battles were actually making up the ELITE 8 for our March Madness Book Bracket! 

Math – This week we took our Unit 4 test.  Tests will be coming home and we will review them with you at Parent-Teacher Conferences this week.

Word Study – We learned about even more vowel teams this week! We built words with ew, ue, oi, and oy

Social Emotional – We’ve been learning about sportsmanship this week. We practiced being good sports all week long, and we even played “sportsmanship charades.”

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Upcoming Dates:

• Monday, March 8 – STEAM, bring GREEN READING LOGS back to school for a raffle ticket! 
• Tuesday, March 9 – MUSIC
• Wednesday, March 10 – PE, Library
• Thursday, March 11 – ART
• Friday, March 12 – STEAM

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Books We’ve Read Together:

Georgetown is ready to “Saddle Up & Read” for March is Reading Month!

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I spent this afternoon getting our school decorated and ready for a WILD WEST reading month. Here is a calendar outlining the special dress-up days and “Wild West” snack days. 

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Also, students came home with a green reading log on Friday. Each week, if they read 75+ minutes, they get a raffle ticket for prizes from the book fair. Plus, the top three students who read the most minutes in Miss Hutchison’s class will get a prize from Miss Hutchison!