Yesterday, for Earth Day, we got to help pick up garbage in the cemetery! I am so proud of these firsties! They make me so proud to be their teacher!
Remember to reduce, reuse, and recycle!
Friday, April 23, 2021
Friday, April 16, 2021
My Apologies!
Families,
This past month has FLOWN by! I can't believe we are already in APRIL! It was just very surprising to me! We have been hard at work in the classroom creating amazing memories from learning to work together to creating amazing art work projects!
We had spring break 2 weeks ago, and since we have been back, we have been on the go the whole time! My students' are just keeping me young!
With that being said, let's check out what we will be working on!
Reading/Writing/Grammar/Phonics
For grammar, we have been working on sequence words and how they pertain to a particular time of day and a particular order! (Such as first, second, morning, evening, later, etc) They have MASTERED this! My students are doing amazing with this! Coming up, we are going to be working on context clues, which will help us figure out what some words mean by using the rest of the sentence to solve! This is a very hard concept for first graders, but I know my students'' will be troopers and amaze me again!
Writing has been very opinionated lately! That is exactly what we have been working on! We have been determining if what we are writing about could be facts of opinions, and so far, we have written about our favorite food, and WHY it is the best food ever! I love how creative my friends are and it amazes me every year what we are creating in the classroom!
Reading has been going AMAZING! Your child should come home today and tell you the good news to their new reading levels! In class we have learned about Clarabelle-The Milking Cow! Coming up, we will be focusing on the word "Perseverance" and how our characters in our next story show us how strong they are by continuing to push through no matter how hard the task is!
Phonics has just been PHENOMENAL! We just wrapped up our last unit on long o's! We have mastered short and long vowels! Coming up, we are going to be focusing on s blends!
Math
Going into spring break, I wanted to make sure it was an easy chapter, and it has been amazing! We have focused on number patterns and place value! Next chapter we are going to be working on is numbers from 1-120, and addition and subtraction with regrouping and without regrouping! This is a struggle for some students, but I know that they will be mathematicians by the end of this lesson! Keep practicing the flash cards!
Religion
We have just finished up our unit on Easter and the next chapter of Pentecost. Next chapter coming up, we will be focusing on who the Church serves.
Science and Social Studies
For science, we have been working on simple machines! We are professionals with them! We can name all of them and give real world examples! Next unit coming up will be senses!
Social studies we are wrapping up our unit on Geography! We now know there are 5 oceans and 7 continents! We know we live on the continent of North America and live in the country of the United States!
Final Countdown
Be on the lookout for the calendar countdown for the final 26 days of school! You will soon have second graders on your hands!
Saint Research
We did an AMAZING job researching our Saint! We got to pick one Saint to read all about them!
Coming Up
April 23-Mass at 8:15
April 27-ABC Countdown Starts
April 30-Mass at 8:15
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
How Have We Been in School 100 days?!
That is right, the first grade class has been in person for 100 days of school! Thank you parents for keeping your child healthy and happy so that we may remain in person! Now this year we had a special 100 days of school, it happened to fall on Catholic Schools Week, so we got a double whammy in celebrations, COVID style!
At the end of the blog today, I will upload the students' 100 year old self portraits ~ I just love this day and activity!
Valentine's Party 
Our Valentine exchange is on Friday, February 12! We will decorate our bags in the classroom, and exchange our valentine's and then they will bring them home on Monday. That way the treats from the other homes will have time to quarantine. This will be a party day also, and we are going to celebrate with an ice cream party and a short valentine movie!
Reading/Writing/Phonics
For reading, we are continuing to grow in our reading skills! Whether we are working on individual books, or whole group reading skills, all I can see is EVERYBODY is growing! We often start our weeks out with an "I Wonder" activity which is where we ask 3-4 questions about the text we are listening too to help us gain a greater understanding. This week we will be reading "Henry's Freedom Box" which is about slavery. Next week, we are working our stories about the previous Presidents. Our focus will be about Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
Writing has been so fun in our procedural texts! These are our "How To" books! I am surprised at how many students know how to "drive" but it is quite intriguing! We are going to be finishing up this unit within the next two weeks, and our next writing unit will be writing for a reason! We are going to try our awesome skills at persuading our readers into something new and exciting!
For phonics, we have focused on long vowel sounds! We did finish up the CVCe works (long vowel sounds with the silent e at the end) and now we are trying our cards with long vowel sounds with double vowels! We have really worked hard on "the first vowel does the talking, the second does the walking".
Math
We have finished our graphing unit, and now we are working on a quick shape unit! Within this shape unit, we are going to be introduced to fractions! Then we will revisit fractions around April again! I love this shapes unit as it involves very creative kids when we make our shape monsters and create stories to go with her or him!
Religion
We are continuing to work on looking at all the wonders Jesus has given us! Lent is coming up with Ash Wednesday, and we will be talking about what we will be giving up or adding to our daily routine over the course of Lent. Sometimes, we give up desserts for the entire time of Lent, and sometimes we can make sure we tell one person something positive to our daily routine!
Science/Social Studies
For science, we will be finishing up our unit on States of Matter! (solid, liquid, gas) This week, we will make oobleck (come back to check out the pictures!) Then we will be checking out the outer space unit! That is one of my favorites!
Social studies we are still focusing on Community Economics! We have gone over wants/needs, goods/services, and producer/consumers! We have realized that we can fall into BOTH categories for the producers and consumers, and depending on how we look at it, we have to figure out which one we are! We will be continuing on with this unit till the end of February!
Parent-Teacher Conferences
The end of this month we will be having parent-teacher conferences! I will be sending home a sign up worksheet if you are interested in talking about your child! I am happy to meet with all of you, after school, via zoom! Thank you for all your hard work!
Fun Pictures, we are 100 years old!
Coming up!
February:
12th - Mass 8:15am, Valentine's Party
17th- Ash Wednesday
19th - Mass 8:15am; Fish Fry pick up only 4-7:30pm
24th - Mass 8:15am
26th - No School!!
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
January is Almost Over!
While Christmas was a nice break from the classroom, I sure did miss all of my students! I had many students tell me all the cool new gifts they got, but one thing they all really shared was getting to spend time with their families! And my heart melted at that moment, as an educator, the family is the most important to my students, and they were all so grateful for that special time, despite Covid still being active.
End of Quarter 2
As we are coming to the end of 2nd quarter, I have seen some tremendous growth among ALL of my students! I can not WAIT to see where the rest of the school year will lead too!
So, with it being the end of quarter 2, we have wrapped up a lot of our units! Onto quarter 3!
Grammar, Reading, Writing, and Phonics
For grammar--, we have finished up our unit on verb tenses! We looked at past tense verbs and how they end in the "ed". We looked at our present tense verbs and how they could end in an "s" or "ing". Then our future tense verbs all had "will" before our verb! We also took a few days to look at irregular verbs and we talked about how they don't follow the same rules as previously mentioned!
This was the video we listened to in class and just danced the whole time!
Reading we have been focusing on different stories and really diving deep into the text structure! We have been working with new vocabulary words, identifying problems and solutions and characters in our stories, and we have been thinking deeper about how the characters respond in our text! We also have a weekly theme that we focus on to help us gain that foundation of our texts! We have read stories about Martin Luther King Jr, Bad Case of Stripes, Invisible Boy, and Duck! Rabbit!.
I still continue to meet in small groups, however, I am grouping them best by their reading ability on RAZ kids, and we focus on skills that they struggle with. So far almost everybody has grown in their reading ability! I can only imagine how much more growth I am going to see!
Writing is one of my favorite things to teach as I love to see how we ALL grow! We will be focusing on these next few weeks are "How To" stories! We are going to focus on what we need to include in our "How To" stories, that they will be bringing home several examples! Enjoy them!
Phonics has been ALL about long vowel sounds with the "magic e" (or how we call it, the Grandma e) rule! The "Grandma e" tells our other vowel to say his name while she remains quiet! This has been a struggle for my students as they hear the sound, and only write the sound, and forget all about "Grandma e". Such as we talk about hope, they hear /h/ /o/ /p/, so that is what they write while listening to the long /o/ sound, and I need them to remember to add that "Grandma e". We are still working on it daily! Next week we will be focusing on long vowel e sounds, which end up being our ee/ea vowels!
Math
We have finished up our unit on adding and subtracting within 100! What that represents is my students can add and subtract 96-30= ? OR 30 + 43=?. They have worked SO hard on this! I have students who use manipulatives, they also use a 100's chart, but they are working so hard on mastering this skill!
One thing to really work on with our students for the rest of the year would be subtraction facts! Any memorization of subtraction facts will make second grade seem like a breeze!
If you are looking for online suggestions, just for some fun, educational games, check out ABCYA or eSpark.app. For eSpark, I actually get to check out what they have been working on! If you are looking for their login, it is their first name and last name, and then password is BEAM.
So for example-my login would be MRSFRIESEN
and my password would be BEAM
Just like that! I do have one student who has a 2 at the end of his name, and his password is BOOT, that is because it would NOT allow me to save his information! If you need help wondering if this is your child, please feel free to email me!
Religion
For religion, we have wrapped up our unit on Forgiveness! We will be working on our next chapter that discusses the importance of our family and our church family!
Science and Social Studies
Social studies will be focusing on Community Economics! So if your child comes home and is demanding payment for their chores, I am truly sorry! We are learning about how we work for an income and earn money to buy things we want and need! We will be focusing on wants and needs and being able to tell the difference!
Check out our last science experiment! We made our own snow using diapers and water! Check out the school's Facebook page to see more fun pictures that Mrs. Cowart took!
Catholic Schools Week Line-Up
Monday-February 1-Cookies and Read-In. Dress as a Book Worm, Big Glasses, or nerdy look
Tuesday-February 2-Leukemia hop at 8:30 am. St. Edward wear!
Wednesday-February 3-All Catholic Schools Mass with Bishop virtually at 10:00am. Wear comfy clothes.
Thursday-February 4-Neon Day, wear neon!
Friday-February 5-No School
Coming Up:
January
22-No school
29-Mass 8:15
31-Start of Catholic Schools Week
February
(Check out Catholic Schools Week Line-Up)
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