Burnham Library Field Trip

Yesterday both our class and Ms. Barnett's class took a walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library down the street from school as part of our theme unit on Community Helpers. We learned about the library and about the things librarians can help us learn and do at the library! Student who already have library cards with the Burnham checked out books at the end of our visit. If your child does not have a library card with our town library, but would like one, you are welcome to send me a note and I will send home a registration card so you can sign up for one (I took some registration cards back to school with us yesterday) or you can make a visit to the Burnham Library just up the street from school!

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Sight Words

My last post detailed our recent practice with decoding strategies in reading. Another important component to reading in first grade is memorizing sight words. In first grade, students learn the first 100 words on the Fry Sight Word List. This is a list of the most commonly read words in the English language, many of which cannot be sounded out. Because these words often cannot be sounded out, yet are seen so frequently in the books students read, it is very helpful for the words to be memorized. One of the links at the top of my blog will direct you to a list of the 100 sight words students are expected to learn to read during first grade, if you would like to practice these at home. A page listing these same words also went home in the packet given out at curriculum night, if you prefer to use that list.

Reading Strategies

For the past two weeks our class has been focused on learning reading strategies to help decode (or figure out) unfamiliar words while reading. We have a reading strategy bulletin board in our classroom with eight decoding strategies posted and space to the left of them where we will add in strategies for reading comprehension, fluency, accuracy, and vocabulary expansion as the year goes on and we become stronger readers! You can see our eight decoding strategies and the bulletin board in the photos below. You can ask your child what each of these strategies means and he or she should be able to tell you. We have been practicing using these strategies during reading mini-lessons, silent reading, and in reading groups at school so you may find it helpful to refer to the same strategies when helping your child read at home! Here are the eight strategies:

Eagle Eye- look at the picture to help figure out the word

Lips the Fish- get your mouth ready to make the first sound in the word

Stretchy Snake- stretch out the sounds in the word slowly then put them together to make the word

Skippy Frog- skip the unfamiliar word, finish the sentence, think of what would make sense, then re-read the sentence adding the word in

Chunky Monkey- look for familiar word chunks (like -an, -it, etc) inside of a bigger word

Detective Kangaroo- look to see if you have already seen the word in the book you are reading and try to remember it

Tryin' Lion- if what you read didn't make sense, try again.

Flippy Dolphin- if the word didn't sound right, try flipping the vowel sound (flipping from a short vowel sound to a long vowel sound or vice versa)

Try these out at home! The kids have found that they often use more than one strategy at a time, such as using lips the fish to get the first sound of a word, then stretchy snake to stretch out the rest.

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RAZ Kids Password Change

I just wanted to let families know that I changed the login passwords for RAZ Kids so that they are now the same as the login passwords for students' Kid Blogs. Passwords for both are now the student's last name (starting with an uppercase letter) so that they will be easier to remember. Students in our class have begun using their blogs and will soon learn to use RAZ kids too. If you know how to use the website and would like to show them (or if they have an older sibling who knows how to show them) you are welcome to begin! RAZ Kids can be accessed through a tab at the top of this blog and the Kid Blogs can be accessed from the right sidebar of this blog.

Community Helpers

This week first graders began a social studies theme unit called Community Helpers! We have been discussing what the word "community" means, what different jobs people do in our community, and how the workers doing these jobs help the community. Coincidentally this week was also Fire Safety Week, so we spent a lot of our theme time learning about fire fighters and fire safety. Today, at the end of our discussion about fire safety, kids in our class made Dalmation fire hats/crowns as a fun, Friday afternoon activity. Kids are also bringing home worksheets about fire safety at home. These are one way that kids and families can make a plan for what to do in a fire emergency at home. Later this month first grade classes hope to take a walking field trip to the fire station down the street from our school to continue learning about fire safety and how fire fighters are important community helpers. Below are some photos of the kids making their hats!

This afternoon our new Colchester Chief of Police and Officer Fontaine (our school's DARE officer) came to school to talk to first graders about how police officers are community helpers in our town! We hope meet and learn about lots of different community helpers during our unit and we are off to a great start.

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Kid Blogs are up!

This afternoon our class got to try out using their Kid Blogs for the first time. Kid blog is an app that you can download for free on your ipad, or you can access your child's Kid Blog by visiting my blog on your computer, ipad, or wherever you have the internet. You will notice a sidebar on the right of my blog with a list of all student names in our class. Simply click on your child's name and he/she can log in to write a post and you can read what he/she wrote and leave a comment! Each child's password is their last name (several students told me that theirs didn't work today and I reminded them that their last name begins with an uppercase letter so please remind them of that if logging in at home!) and, should you need it, the class username is mrskellysclass-19, though the blogs should be all set without it. Today we practiced typing our passwords and logging in. Some students had time to try writing a post, too. You are welcome to blog with your child at home through their Kid Blog (these are very easy to access from my blog home page) and kids will have begin having more opportunities to blog in class as well once we set up a blogging routine!

Quad Blogging -- Learning to Make Quality Comments

As we have continued our Quad Blog experience, our class has begun to focus on making quality comments to others' blog posts. We watched the great Youtube video below and then discussed what makes for a "quality comment." After our discussion we tried our hand at making a few quality comments to Mrs. Darling's Class blog (the class in our Quad who is this week's "spotlight class"). If you'd like you can have a look at the comments we made by checking out her blog. Learning to write quality posts and quality comments will help our students prepare for successfully blogging on their own as we will soon be launching our Kid Blogs in class!

Video on writing quality comments

Mrs. Darling's class blog - England