January 27, 2014

Hello First Grade Families!

I hope that you had a fabulous and relaxing weekend.  Just for your information, Mrs. Figueroa will be started her maternity leave today.  Baby Owen has not been born yet but we are hoping that he will be born within the next few days.  We will let you know when he has been born.

We have some exciting things planned for this week.

Literature: We started the week talking about the saying "sour grapes."  All your students should be able to tell you what it means.  We will also continue our Aesop's fables unit with "The Goose the Laid the Golden Eggs." On Friday, the students will get to try to create their own fable.

History: We wrapped up our unit on Early American Explorers and Settlers today.  A book was sent home with all the work from this unit.  Tomorrow we will start our unit titled "Colonies to Independence."  We will start by talking about the 13 colonies and the Boston Tea Party this week.

Science: Your students have really been enjoying the Oceans unit.  Today and tomorrow we are learning about Manatees.  We will also learn about dolphins and Orca whales this week.

Reminders: 

• Yearbooks are on sale now.  A note went home with your student today.  You can buy them online at http://www.archwaychandler.org/yearbooks. They cost $20 until February 21 at which time the price goes up by $10.  
• Friday is a half-day.  All students will be released at either 12:15 or 12:30.  

January 21, 2013

Hello wonderful first grade families!  We hope that you had a fabulous 3-day weekend especially with such beautiful weather.  We had a nice week last week getting to know Mrs. Hill and we are very excited to have her in our class.  Here is a summary of what we are studying this week.

Literature: We will be studying two new fables this week, "The Wolf in Sheep's Clothing" and "The Fox and the Grapes."  Ask your students to tell you about these fables and what the moral of each story is.

Science: The students have been really enjoying our ocean unit.  This week we will be learning about sea horses, invertebrates that live in the Abyss, sea stars, and angular fish.  Angular fish have a special feature called bioluminescense that the children will be able to tell you all about by Friday.

History: We are excited to learn about the pilgrims this week.  We will talk about the Mayflower and the First Thanksgiving.  We will also talk about the Puritans along with similarities and differences between the Pilgrims and the Puritans.

Have a wonderful week!

January 13, 2013

Welcome back to school!  With conferences happening last week, I did not get a chance to update the blog. We told everyone at conferences that I (Mrs. Pratt) will be taking over teaching for Mrs. Figueroa when she goes on maternity leave.  She is due on January 27 and is planning on working up until then.  We will be sure to let you know when the baby is born.  The other changes that we have in the classroom are that Ms. Noori was asked to move into Mrs. Mott's classroom and we have a new assistant teacher that started today.  Her name is Mrs. Hill.  She will be here full-time with me while Mrs. Figueroa is gone.  She is excited to get to know the kids and start working with them.

Please feel free to contact Mrs. Hill (chill@archwaychandler.org) or me (cpratt@archwaychandler.org) with anything that you need.

Here is what we started last week in our curriculum and will continue this week.

Literature: Last week we started fables.  We discussed what fables are and read "The Country Boy who Cried Wolf."  We also made masks and had the students put on a play with this fable.  This week, we will be reading "Dog in the Manger" and "Maid and the Milk Pail."

History: Last week we started our unit on Early Explorers and Settlers.  All of last week we talked about Christopher Columbus, where he came from, what he was trying to find, and where he did find.  This week we will talk about the first settlers along with some of the hardships they faced as well as their successes.

Science: We have started our unit on Oceans.  This is always a favorite unit for the students.  We started by talking about where the oceans are as well as their names and also the continents and their names.  This week we will also talk about the five different layers of the oceans.

We also started reading groups up again today.  Mrs. Schubring created a new sign-up genius for you to sign up for reading groups.  Please remember to sign-up and come help us with reading groups. Here is the link for the sign-up genius: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F044CABA92F4-classroom1.

Please remember that next Monday is a Martin Luther King Day.  There will be no school that day.  Also, mark your calendars for January 31 which will be a half day.

We hope you all have a wonderful week!