Literatura
This week we didn’t have a lot of time but we were able to start our new story in our new unit: El tiempo (the weather). This will be a fun unit and it was especially fun to start reading our story about storms. The students wanted to know what kind of storms there are so we talked about rain storms, wind storms, SNOW storms!
We did some dictation on the diphthong /io/. The students are getting better and better with their dictation! This is such an important activity and will lead them to be more confident writers, instead of always asking, “How do you spell….”
Our Friday journal writing activity combined our new story and our recent SNOW DAY experiences! Students wrote 1-3 sentences about what they like to do after a big snow happens. (First graders were required to write 3 sentences.)
All students read with me this week. Please remember to have your child reading on a nightly basis!!
Matemáticas
This week we did not have a lot of time for math due to the holiday and then the snow days!! Argh!!!! Students did take their 4 minute timed addition tests on both Tuesday and Friday.
Please be sure to play games, do flashcards, or have your child sit at the computer and do some quick drill games. I showed them one game from a link I put in another newsletter a couple weeks ago. Here are some more links for ideas:
https://www.mathgames.com/grade1
History & Geography
This week in our Early American Civilization unit we again to read about the Inca. Together we worked on a map to show where the Inca empire was and what countries are in this area now. We looked at some items from this region today, and we illustrated one of our lessons for the class bulletin board.
Our objectives this week were:
• understand that the Inca established a far-ranging empire in the Andes Mountains of Peru and Chile many, many years ago
• understand that the Inca had leaders (emperors)and a religion
• identify the area in which the Inca lived
• retail the legend of Viracocha
• understand that legends are like folktales that are past down from one generation to another, they often help explain things in the world.
Science
In our science unit on matter this week we took our end of the unit assessment, the class did very well. We celebrated the end of this unit with a Root Beer Float States of Matter investigation. The students enjoyed mixing the matter and identifying what state of matter the root beer, ice cream, and foam were in. We made predictions on whether there would be more foam if ice cream was added before or after the roof beer. This we we concluded our investigations from last week; we learned that oil and water do not mix, that the water from our salt water mixture evaporated leaving salt behind, and that liquid in a freezer changes its state but a solid in the freezer does not.
• understand there are three forms of matter; solid, liquid, or gas
• understand that matter can change or be a mixture.
• explain that matter can change in different ways, some changes are reversible and other changes are irreversible
• measure matter and observe changes over time.
English Word Work
This week we got our new sorts for spelling. Green group had another short vowel words with ending blends. Blue group reviewed “an”, “in” and “un” word family words (they should have brought a copy of their sort home to work on), Red group had “ad”and “an” word family words.
Word wall words were: way, one, won
Vocabulary words were: possessions, folktale