Week 33 Highlights!

May 9, 2021 by Miss Hutchison | 0 comments

Happy Mother’s Day! Moms, I hope you felt loved and appreciated by your families today! Your first graders love you more than words can describe!!

Notes for Parents:

Thank you so much for the sweet notes, treats, and tokens of appreciation this past week. I truly believe I have the best job in the world, and I get to teach the most amazing first graders. Thank you for sharing your children with me!
Our final classroom transformation of the year will be next Friday, May 21. If you would like to donate an item for our “Jungle Safari” day, please check out this sign-up.
We still need about 10 more cereal boxes by the end of this week for our writing project! If you have any extra empty cereal boxes around your house, I would love to take them off your hands! We are going to turn our realistic fiction stories into “series box sets,” so each child will need a cereal box to use. 🙂

CELEBRATIONS

Top Frog – We had five “Top Frogs” (star students) in our classroom this week: Logan, Joshua, Mason, Keegan, and Kylie.! For this round, the top frog gets to pick a friend and eat lunch with Miss Hutchison! Plus, the top frog is our door holder and line leader.

15 Star Reward– We enjoyed a little tech free play time earlier this week as part of our 15 star reward for great behavior!

Appreciation – We showed our appreciation for the lunchroom staff on Friday by making them special flowers… “Thank you bunches for our lunches!” We also wrote notes of encouragement to the fourth graders as they began MSTEP this week. Plus, we were so excited to bring home our Mother’s Day presents to share with you this weekend. 💕

First Grade Family Time – Here are the award winning first graders from this week’s family time. Now is a great time for your child to learn how to tie their shoes so they can join the shoe-tying club by the end of the school year!

Quote of the Week – Since every student in our class has earned a quote of the week this year, our class voted for another person in our school to earn this quote. They chose to give this quote to Miss VanderKolk for showing us kindness and love all year long!

OUR LEARNING:

Reading– This week in reading we learned about main characters and supporting characters too! This was a great tie in to our writing as it has been so fun creating our own characters. We also talked about changing our voices when our character’s feelings change and looked for clues on how to read our stories.

Writing – In writing this week we added some new tools to our writing toolboxes! We learned how to “show not tell” by adding tiny realistic details. Later we learned all about repetition and the importance of patterns in writing. Next week we will wrap up our realistic fiction writing unit and students will publish their very own boxed book series!

Math – This week we focused on time in our day and the tasks we carry out at specific times. We also learned how to tell and write time in half-hours! The remainder of the week was dedicated to shapes and their attributes.

Word Study – In first grade, one of the best ways for students to learn something new is through play and practice! We practiced proper use of capital letters through lots of different word games this week. Please encourage your child to capitalize proper nouns and the start of each sentence when they’re writing at home!

Social Emotional – This week Little Penguin shared with us about diversity and respect for differences. We talked about family stories and differences from around the world.

Cursive – Our first graders have been BEGGING me to teach them how to sign their names in cursive, so I made cursive tracing pages for them to use with their whiteboard pouches to practice signing their names in cursive. They are over the moon excited!