*Tomorrow the students may dress down for the field trip.  The weather channel website shows a high of 57 and a chance of rain. 


*The first graders have math homework tonight.


*Mass parts went home today.  Please practice the readings at home.  We will also be practicing at school.

Classroom Happenings

Reading - We are a few weeks into Daily 5 and pulling groups.  We have a lot of different reading levels.  We have six different reading groups.  When the students aren't in a group, they are working on one of the daily 5 - read to self, read to someone, work on writing, listening, or word work.  The students may also work on Odyssey at this time.  This week and next week our word work focus is nouns.  Our centers are dealing with nouns being a person, place, or thing, and with common and proper nouns.

Religion - In Religion we worked on a little play that dealt with last week's Gospel reading.  For the next week, our Religion focus is practicing for our mass on October 9th. 

Science - Since we are heading to the pumpkin patch this week, we have been learning about pumpkins.  We learned about the life cycle of the pumpkin.  We also learned about the parts of a pumpkin.  We made some cool art projects to go along with what we learned.

1st grade Math - We have started working on subtraction.  The students have been making circle drawings to figure out the answer.  We have been working on story problems and writing the correct label.  We have also been writing and figuring out equations.

1st grade phonics - This week we are working with digraphs.  We have been scooping sentences for fluency.  We learned about non-sense words - words that aren't words, but we can figure them out by sounding out and tapping.  We learned five new trick words.  Today we worked on dictation - I say a sound or a word and they write it down - all while forming the letters the correct way and putting the letters in the correct spaces.

Writing - We continue to write in our journals and we are in the beginning stages of writer's workshop.

Spelling - I think we'll start spelling at the end of the month.  Looking at the October Calendar - We have two Fridays off.  I'm shooting for the last week of October.

Here is a tidbit from Mrs. Ihlenfeldt on art -

Art - Multi Grade 1 and 2

    Grades 1 and 2 have Art 1 time per week for 1 hour. Our goal in art the first few weeks is to review, practice and learn our classroom rules and expectations.  We read a few stories to put us at ease about beginning to draw, and looking at a mistake as a “happy accident”  just waiting to be made into a new, creative idea.  So, we began drawing with a dot like the student in the story, The Dot. This led to other dots, big, small, simple and complicated. We were amazed at how the artist, Georges Seurat, painted Sunday Afternoon at the Isle of La Grande Jatte, 1884-86, all with dots! Whew! That is a lot of dots! Students realized this painting was from a different time period by the clothes people were wearing. We had a fun discussion about this. “You mean you don’t wear a long dress, or top hat and cane when you go to the park to play?”

       In the story Ish,  a student stops drawing when someone askes him in a not so nice way, “What is that?” in reference to his art work. He stops drawing because he can’t draw things perfectly. Then he realizes his sister is saving all his crumpled up,  thrown away drawings. She thinks his vase of flowers looks “vase-ish.” So in class we began to draw “boat-ish”, and “fish-ish”, and “tree-ish” and “afternoon-ish”, and we drew “worry free-ish.” Then we practiced saying one thing we really liked about another student’s “art work-ish.” Have a great week.

Mrs. Jeanne Ihlenfeldt

Have a great night!  Go Pack!