March

We had another super productive and exciting month in first grade! The University of New Hampshire Department of Theater and Dance presented an incredible show called Winnie the Pooh Birthday Tail to all of the first graders, we had an amazing visit from the very talented children's book author Cathryn Falwell, we hosted the March community meeting to celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday on March 2nd, and we had an author celebration in our classroom! It sure was a great month!

On top of all these fun events, we have also been hard at work in all academic areas:

*Reading: We have continued to work on sequencing and retelling a story and also have focused on sharing opinions about a book, finding the main idea in a text, and noticing what the author does with language to make a book interesting or funny. At home, you might ask your student to retell the story from the beginning to the end or ask them to tell you what their opinion of the book is and why.

*Math: Our last unit focused on geometry and we studied the attributes of shapes, polygons, symmetry, etc. We made designs using pattern block shapes, built 3D shapes, and created a shape museum. Other mathematical concepts included time (to the minute), money (added quarters and dollars), data, problem-solving, and fact power.

*Science: We began our unit on pebbles, sand, and silt and have been closely observing rocks and noticing their attributes. Students have been collecting rocks and adding them to our rock museum and sorting rocks, noticing their similarities and differences. Each child also got to paint a pet rock!

*Spelling: We have been focusing on silent e words, long a words, short vowels vs. long vowels, homophones, antonyms, using known words to solve unknown words, and changing the beginning, middle, or end of a word to make a new word.

*Writing: Thank you to everyone involved that helped to make our author celebration a HUGE success! Our authors were incredibly proud of themselves and truly shined as they displayed what outstanding writers and readers they have become. I hope that you were all as proud of them as I was! We are currently enjoying their published books in the classroom, but after vacation they will get to take them home.


Our classroom has now been overcome with the joy of poetry! We have been reading, writing, and breathing poetry! It would be a great connection at home to spend time sharing your favorite poems with your student. Any way that you can encourage the excitement of poetry at home would be very beneficial (check out books at the library, find poetry on the internet, write poetry with your child, etc.) Their challenge is to read as much poetry as they can and over the next couple of weeks to have a few favorite poems and poets.

Thanks to everyone that filled out a survey - they were very helpful!