Hello, Room 4 Families. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday weekend with your family and loved ones last weekend. We have been very busy in Room 4! Below are some reminders, announcements, and classroom updates.  

Announcements / Reminders:

•As winter approaches, I want to remind families that children need the “Big 5” when the snow starts to fly. The ‘Big 5” are a coat, mittens or gloves, a hat or hood, boots, and snow pants. At this point, I do not see snow in our forecast but, you never know! New England is full of surprises!  

•Please consider sending in snow pants and boots to remain in the classroom. We will send them home for washing when they get muddy.  :) Having boots here will also help keep our classroom rug and floor mud-free for the many times a day we are on the floor. Thank you!

•Please remember to check our Sharing Schedule and mark your calendar with the days your child has sharing.  

•Did you know that Friday, 12/23, is now an early release day?  Dismissal is at 11:30 AM with no lunch in school.  We return to school on Tuesday, 1/3/23.  

•I have uploaded some videos and photos to our class album. Enjoy!

Classroom Updates:

Phonics

We learned the glued sound “all.”  

What is the keyword and spelling of the sound, "all?" 

How do you mark this glued sound?

Here are our current trick words:

a, and, as, be, for, has, his, he, into, is, I, me, of, one, or, said, she, the, to, they, was, we, you, your

Reading

We continue to work in our small groups to develop/strengthen comprehension strategies, practice what we learn in phonics when sounding out unknown words, and reading fluency.

We have been developing our schema for the author, Janelle Cannon. As a class, we have read Stellaluna, Crickwing, Pinduli, and Verdi, and are currently reading Trupp.  

As we read more of her books, our schema for her as an author grew. 

How did your schema for Janelle Cannon grow as you read her books?  

What did you notice was similar in her books?  

Was anything different?  

Do you have a favorite Janelle Cannon book?

Science 

We had a fantastic field trip to the Museum of Science Planetarium! 

We are currently making a season wheel and will bring them home once they are done. 

When we learned about the phases of the moon, I shared a project idea with your children. You can recreate the phases of the moon at home with a pencil, orange, and light. Here is a link to this project.  Full disclosure, we would have to find something to use in place of the orange at my house. My daughter would not be willing to sacrifice an orange or clementine, and I wouldn’t want to waste the food.  ;) If you try this at home and use something in place of the orange, please let me know what you used and how it worked! 

We explored air with bubbles and observed what bubbles can tell us about the wind.

Social Studies 

Before Thanksgiving break, we learned about the Nipmucs, who are indigenous to the land we now call Wayland. We learned a bit about their lifestyle and culture and made Nipmuc baskets!   

What does the name Nipmuc mean?  (People of the Fresh Water)

What is the name of the dwellings they built and lived in? (Wetus)

We read the book, A Kid's Book About Racism by Jelani Memory. This book is also linked here, on our class website, under the link for the Black Lives Matter Virtual Library.  

Writing  

We have continued to work on adding important details to our writing while working to remember capital letters at the beginning of our sentences and punctuation at the end.  

This past week we began writing opinion pieces. We learned that people have different opinions about the same subject. We can persuade someone to agree with our opinion by writing an opinion piece. We state our opinion and give three reasons that support our opinion. We then restate our opinion. Stay tuned for more on this later!

Math 

First graders have been working with number bonds, creating fact families, and noticing the relationship between addition and subtraction. Each student is working on their targeted numbers based on an assessment completed individually. Below is a visual of a number bond, dot array, and fact family.