September 8th

We took these cute 1st Grade photos! 

FOR PICTURES OF YOUR CHILD IN THE 1ST GRADE FRAME CLICK HERE

Welcome to 1D, everyone!  

It was such a pleasure to meet all the students finally on the first day of school.  

They are all so precious and it is going to be a great year in Grade One!

This week our focus was on learning routines and getting to know our names. 

We began each morning with fine motor centres, which was a great opportunity for the students to talk amongst their table friends and get to know each other. We will continue to start our mornings like this for a couple more weeks.

Students were strengthening their hands by using punches and paper, playing
with playdough, colouring and playing with Lego.

We read the story Chrysanthemum, which is about a little girl who has a very long and unique name and her classmates make fun of her.  This led us to discuss how everyone has a name, some are different and some are the same, but everyone deserves to be treated kindly.  We talked about how each time you make fun of someone, it hurts their heart so always think about what you say before you say it.

We created a crumpled heart that we tried to heal with bandaids.

We then did a lot of activities exploring our names. We counted how many letters we had in our names and made a class graph.
We made flowers out of the letters in our names.

I introduced the first part of the Daily 5: Read to Self.

The students and the teacher have very specific expectations for Read to Self, which we learned about through reading some great stories and discussion.  We then made an anchor chart that we review every day so the students remember the expectations.  

We practiced Read to Self each day and we managed to work our way up to      3 1/2 minutes of solid independent reading - way to go 1D!  We will keep building our stamina.

They love finding cozy spots to read around the classroom!

 Another book that we read was Have You Filled Your Bucket Today?

We discussed ways that we can be 'bucket fillers' and not 'bucket dippers', then the students coloured their bucket and wrote a sentence about what they could do.

I worked with each student one-on-one to help them write a sentence.  Some students wrote the entire sentence on their own, others did some sounds with some assistance and others had full assistance.  But whichever level of writing they are at, they were sure proud of those sentences!

"Give you (a high) five."

"Give money to someone"

"Give 10 cents"

"Save someone from a bully"

"Help a friend"

"Sharing my candy"

In Math, we are busy counting sets, writing numbers and using 10 Frames. We were pretty successful at Math centres and we learned a fun game where we had to count the pips on dominos and match them to the correct card.

We drew self - portraits! So cute!

And we learned about the Zones of Regulation so that we can be in the green zone as much as possible - ready to learn!