Conference Sign Up

If you already sent in your parent conference sign up sheet I signed you up for a time on my schedule and tomorrow I will be sending the forms back to you with your conference time highlighted. Please be on the lookout for those. If you have not returned the conference sign up sheet yet, please send it back to school in your child's folder as soon as you are able to. Thank you!

Parent Conferences

Today UMS teachers sent home forms for families to sign up for fall parent-teacher conferences, which will be held on Monday and Tuesday November 24 and 25. Please look for those in your child's green folder today and please let me know if, for whatever reason, you did not receive a new one and I will send another! I schedule conferences as I receive the forms back at school so please return them promptly. Thank you very much!

Volunteer Reading Program

Just a reminder, our first grade volunteer reading program begins on Monday October 13 from 10:30-11:30! We are excited to have volunteers begin reading with us. If you signed up to volunteer and need me to remind you what day you signed up for please let me know. If you did not get to sign up yet but would like to please let me know as well! We love our reading volunteers!

Burnham Library Field Trip

We just scheduled our walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library and I am sending out a "save the date!" Each fall the first grades study Community Helpers as a theme unit. We visit (or have visits from) the fire department, police department, and town librarians as part of our learning about the different jobs in our community. On Friday October 24 our class and Ms. Barnett's class will be taking a walking field trip to the Burnham Memorial Library at 1pm. If you would like to join us it would be wonderful! We could use as many adults as are available to help us walk safely to the library and back. Please email me or send in a note if you are able to join us!

Readers' Workshop and Writers' Workshop

Our class has been working hard in Readers' Workshop and Writers' Workshop each day and I took some great photos to show off some of the things going on!

During Readers' Workshop we begin each day with a mini-lesson (recently we have been learning reading strategies for decoding words as well as learning about the story elements of character, setting, and character traits -- up next: main idea and supporting details), followed by time where students read to themselves (we are practicing building stamina for reading silently for a little bit longer each day), then a literacy center time where students are either partner reading, reading on their RAZ kids online reading accounts, or working on literacy apps on iPads (we will be practicing adding in more center choices such as listening and word work activities one at a time as we go along). We end Readers' Workshop with a group share related to the day's mini-lesson.

During Writers' Workshop we begin each day with a mini-lesson (we are currently learning about writing "small moments" which are personal narratives about things happening in our lives), followed by time for students to work on writing independently, and finally a share time, where students are able to share their work with the class. Yesterday we did a different type of share where everyone partnered up and got to share a piece they have been working on and editing with one partner!

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Open House

Reminder! Tonight, Thursday, from 6:30-7:30 is Open House at UMS! I hope to see you there!

RAZ Kids

Today we started learning about (and practicing with) our RAZ Kids reading accounts in class and the students are really excited to start using them. In order to do this at home kids should go to my blog (this one), click the tab along the top that says "RAZ Kids," then click on the link and type in my username (hkellyg) if prompted to do so, then type in their last name (beginning with an uppercase letter) as a password. When you click the RAZ Kids tab you will find these same instructions. The students will then be taken to a page full of books at their good fit reading level that they can both listen to and read on their own. Kids will each have one day a week where they can read their RAZ Kids books during silent reading in class and they are welcome and encouraged to read them at home as well! They will earn stars for books read which can then be used to build a robot or rocket ship in the RAZ Kids program! I did tell students that this bonus part of the program needs to be saved for use at home and that we will only be doing the reading part here at school. Everyone was very excited about this and we opened up our brand new classroom Chromebooks to get started with this today! Please let me know if you have any questions regarding RAZ Kids and enjoy!