New Fall Bulletin Board

Hopes and Dreams

Our class just finished discussing our hopes and dreams (goals) for the year and made a book about them. Students hopes for this year include going on field trips, learning to use technology in new ways, hatching chicks and caring for them, learning soccer in PE, doing more art projects, doing research, and learning to be better readers. Our class will be doing all of those things this year but students each chose one goal that they were personally most interested in as their hope and dream for first grade! The photos below show which hope and dream each child chose.

Our class has been working on building stamina when it comes to doing academic work! Ask your child and hopefully he/she can tell you what it means to build stamina because I talk about it a lot! We have been practicing doing sustained reading, writing, and math work for a little bit longer each day as we work toward being totally on our regular schedule in first grade. The first three are photos of students practicing being considerate buddy readers. and the last two are photos of students in math groups (one group practices a skill related to the day's lesson with me and the other works on their Dreambox math account online then we switch).

Words, Words, Words!

Our class has begun learning and practicing new vocabulary with a fun activity. We are choosing a big word that is important to what we are learning about in school but is also a new word to most students, then putting the word on a sentence strip at the top of our classroom whiteboard. Anytime someone in class (student or adult) uses the word correctly and others notice it we put a tally mark on the sentence strip. We are trying to incorporate our word in daily conversation so that students start using it naturally and it becomes part of their vocabulary. Once we get really familiar with our word we will switch it out for another one on the board, though hopefully still use it as we talk to one another!

Our first word is considerate. We have been learning about ourselves, each other, and how to become a classroom community and have talked a lot about behavior that is considerate or inconsiderate and how our actions and words make others feel. Try to use the word considerate at home to help your child practice a new vocabulary word!

Self Portraits

We have finished our self portrait project! Here are photos of the class continuing their work as well as the finished products!