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!