Welcome to our blog Fantastic First Grade Families! We hope you enjoy reading about what we're up to in Room 21. Make sure you check back often, we're always learning new and exciting things in First Grade!

Don't forget to check out Scholastic! Our Class Activation Code is L9K9F.

Monday, December 2, 2013

Happy Monday!

Happy Monday Fantastic First Grade Families!

I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and enjoyed the break! I can't believe we only have three weeks before Christmas Break!

This week we are back on track with new spelling words! We will be working with BEGINNING CHUNKS and ENDING CHUNKS. As we become more experienced readers, our brain effortlessly searches for known letters, sounds, and parts of words we know to help us "solve" the parts we don't know. Finding and remembering chunks of letters to decode (reading!) and encode (writing!) is a very important strategy we use throughout our entire lives!

BEGINNING CHUNK: the beginning chunk is the letter(s) in front of the vowel. These are consonants, digraphs, or blends. Most words begin with a beginning chunk. These are also known as onsets. 

ENDING CHUNK: the ending chunk begins at the first vowel to the end of the word or syllable. Every word has an ending chunk (because EVERY word has a vowel!). These are also known as word families or rimes. 

In Writing, we continue to work on teaching books, but we have upped the anty! We have begun writing CHAPTER teaching books! Today we looked at a familiar nonfiction book about sharks and discovered the TABLE OF CONTENTS. We learned that a table of contents is kind of like a schedule - it tells us what is coming up in the book. A table of contents can help us organize our information into chapters and eventually stretch out our teaching books to be longer and more detailed! Everyone is VERY excited to become authors of CHAPTER BOOKS!

We have started a new chapter in Science - Matter. In this chapter we will learn:
What is matter?
What are solids, liquids, and gases?
How can you change matter?
What is a mixture?

Today we learned that matter is anything that takes up space, and mass is the amount of matter in an object. We can describe and group objects using our five senses - by color, size, shape, texture, and weight.

Don't forget - Adopt a Family is still going on! This week we are collecting personal care items such as soap, shampoo, conditioner, baby products, lotion, toothpaste, etc. Every donation (big or small!) really helps our Concord families. Thank you!

Have a great night!

No comments:

Post a Comment