Hooray, we are published authors! Thank you for supporting us for our first Author's Cafe of the year. It was great to see many parents and guests from our school. The students all felt so proud of their hard work. Our next Author's Cafe will probably be in December. Be on the lookout for another invitation! Next time the invitation will come earlier so that parents have more time to plan. We'd love to have as many guests as possible. :]
Every day we participate in a 30 minute segment called "Champion's Review." During this time we review different math concepts, like tens and ones, tens frames, tally marks, weather, 120 charts, graphing, and more. This past week we have been encouraging the students to write complete sentences about the weather. Two of our students, JW and EK, wrote awesome sentences!
This week we are learning about synonyms. The picture to the left is our synonyms anchor chart. You can practice synonyms at home by creating a matching game (like Memory) or simply asking students to come up with synonyms for a list of words. Synonyms are helpful when writing because the students learn to use different words. Encourage your child to use words more interesting Since we came back to school after winter break, we have been working on writing about our opinions. In a previous blog post I showed you our pro/con anchor chart and described how to use it. After students have made their chart and written their opinion, we move on to OREO writing! As you can see in the picture to the left, each letter of the word "Oreo" stands for a part of our opinion writing. When writing about their opinions students should use the format listed on the anchor chart. We discussed that the more reasons and examples we can give, the stronger our writing is. At home, encourage your child to write about their opinion using all of the steps: pro/con chart, OREO plan, and then copying their final draft from the OREO plan. Happy writing! For the third nine weeks of the school year, we are working on writing about our opinions. Last week we asked the question, "Is winter the best season?" As a class we created a Pro/Con chart to help us organize our thinking. To the left you can see our completed chart. We talked about that pros are good things and cons are bad things; the smiley and frowny faces help the students to remember what the words mean. As you are writing opinion pieces with your child at home, ask them to start with a pro/con chart. Once they write in all of their opinions, they should decide what they think. For our writing that we are currently doing about winter, the opinions are either, "I think winter is the best season," or "I do not think winter is the best season." When they know what their opinion is, they will write it across the bottom of their pro/con chart. |
Mrs. Bonds' 1st GradeWe are a class of 18 awesome 1st graders! Archives
July 2015
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