Back for the Final Stretch of First

Maybe I just didn't notice, but as students returned from their Spring vacation, I suddenly noticed how much they have grown. Not only do they look older but they are so much more mature. Did this happen overnight? Over vacation? It sure feels like it. They are ready for 2nd grade, but I am looking forward to spending these last 8 weeks together, stretching our brains a little more and celebrating everything students have accomplished this year. 

Here's a look at our week, both looking back, and looking forward to Friday:

Reading: Students have been working on wrapping up the Adventures of Superkids (first portion of the curriculum). We will finish up this week and should get through 4 or 5 more units by the end of the year. Students are doing a great job keeping up with the pace. Students have been working on compound words and contractions. Students have been practicing adding -ing, -ed, -er and -s/es endings to different syllable pattern words and learning rules to know whether or not the consonant needs to be doubled. Examples: hope->hoping, whereas hop->hopping or look->looked. Students have been participating in small groups with me on a daily basis, exploring leveled texts and group discussions to build comprehension skills. 

Writing: Students have written some beautiful poems so far this week. After reading poems throughout last week and this week, students stepped into the shoes of poets and wrote about an object, looking at it as if it were something else. A asparagus stalk became a paint brush, an eraser a piece of gum, a stapler is a shark, and many more. Students them moved on to write poems about colors. We wrote one together about the color orange: Orange is soft, firey and cozy. Orange is smells like apple pie, pumpkin pie, Orange tastes sour and sweet. Orange is October...." Students will continue to create poems with shapes, similes and metaphors and rhyming/rhythmic poems.

Math: Students have wrapped up the unit on place value and they did such an amazing job on their assessments! I am so proud of them! Today we started data collection and graphing and next week we will head into story problems, looking for the sum, subtrahend, missing addend and subtrahend.

Wish List: We would love some thin black dry erase markers for students to use on their whiteboards. We have gone through several boxes this year and we are out.