Sep. 14-16

 Hello families! 

This week we have been focusing on the idea of kindness. Yesterday, students listened to a story called "Do Unto Otters" and they discussed how classmates should treat each other. They did some writing/otter art. 


Here are a few samples!


Today we also read a story called "What Does it Mean to be Kind?" and further discussed ways to show kindness. Students completed some writing using the sentence starter, "One thing I can do for others is..." We will continue to work on more otter and kindness related activities this week. 


Earlier this week, students worked on a weekend journal where they wrote about what they did over the weekend. I like to use this task at the beginning of each week as it is predictable for students and having a familiar writing task to help them feel more comfortable with writing and taking risks! 

In addition to reviewing the letters P, U, O, and M, we have now reviewed X, A, and D. Our characters for these letters are Felix Fox and Max the Ox, Actress Annie, and Daisy Dragon. This week we will also be reviewing the letters T and S. When learning about the letter D today, we reviewed the difference between a lowercase b and a lowercase d. I use the analogy that a b looks like a big belly and a d looks like a dirty diaper - a bit silly but hopefully it helps them remember which way the letters go!

Today we also talked a little bit about place value since we have now had 11 days of school. Once we filled up our ones, we moved them to the tens place. This is a big, but important, concept for students that we will address throughout the year! Students in grade 1 will be focusing on numbers 0-20 and students in grade 2 will focus on numbers 0-100. We watched this video about place value that uses larger numbers than we need.. but it is catchy and the visuals are great!


Tomorrow we are having our first virtual assembly and there will be a surprise for students! 

Resources
I think there is some sort of back to school bug going around! I wanted to share a few links that might help if you are stuck at home! (I will also add our "Morning Math" to our Google Classroom once it is up and running!) After discussing the letter, we brainstorm words that start with each letter that we heard from the videos. 
Students also really enjoy Number Blocks and Alphablocks (on Youtube) but we don't watch them as often. I'm finding I have to rely on videos a little more frequently than usual as it is difficult to project my voice loud enough for students to hear me at the back of the class, and to help keep them a little more engaged!

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