Holy Cross - First Grade

Spelling - Blends -

grab

best

flip

frog

jump

crash

drip

block

brush

Reading - We are back to working in our guided reading groups and working in our daily 5 centers. This is our favorite time of day! Some of our Christmas centers are putting the reindeer in ABC order, putting the words to Jingle Bells in order, making words out of the letters in Christmas, Christmas mystery pictures with sight words, color the Christmas picture by sight word, Christmas word searches, and Christmas word puzzles.

Phonics - Midweek we finished up our unit with nk glued sounds (ank, ink, onk, unk) and nk/ng glued sounds with a suffix s. We are now being introduced to blends. Blends are 2 consonants together that each make their own sound. They are different than digraphs, because digraphs are 2 consonants that make 1 new sound. We learned how the marking is also different from the digraph marking. A digraph is underlined together. Each letter in the blend is underlined. Our letter cards help us as well. When we have two yellow cards together, we know that it is a blend. Here's an example with the word best.

This unit is also introducing us to the r-controlled vowels. An r-controlled vowel is when you have a vowel followed by the letter r. (ar, er, ir, or, ur) What happens is the vowel is not heard and the r sound takes over. For this reason, the nickname for the r-controlled vowel is the bossy r. We have now been introduced to the ar and the or sound.

We have three new trick words - could, should, and would. We spent some time doing dictation and writing sentences that have our new trick words in them.

Writing - After working for weeks and weeks on our personal narratives (small moments), we are working on publishing our stories. This process has been nothing short of amazing to watch! This past week one of our writer's workshop days was dedicated to editing and adding details. The next w.w. day was dedicated to working on that final copy (publishing). I'm hoping to finish up the publishing this week. My goal is then to have the students record themselves reading their stories in SeeSaw.

Working on publishing

Sharing stories with the class

We have been working on the personal narratives during our writers workshop, but we also fit writing in during other parts of the day as well. Writing is one of our daily 5 centers. The December journals get a lot of love during this time. Here are a few journal entries -

Math - We learned about tally marks. We practiced looking at tally marks and figuring out the number, as well as looking at a number and writing what the tally mark would be. We learned about line segments. We learned to start at one endpoint, use a ruler, and trace to the next endpoint. We learned how to label the line segment. We learned how to add two digit numbers using dimes and pennies to help us. We had a really fun lesson. We pretended we were grocery shopping and we made a receipt. We came up with a store name and then picked two items to buy. We wrote the items down and wrote down their cost. We then added the two amounts together to come up with a total. We used dimes and pennies to add the amounts together. We also learned how to add by putting the ones place numbers and the tens place numbers together.

Religion - We have a Jesse Tree in our classroom. Each day we read a story from the Bible and add that story to our Jesse Tree. On Wednesdays Brother Jacob comes into our classroom. This week he taught us that the reason it is called a Jesse Tree is because it is Jesus' family tree. All of the stories help us to understand Jesus' stories.

We are starting a new Virtues and Values card this week - obedience.

Our Promise Paper this week reminds us that the third week of Advent we light the pink candle. The pink candle is the joy candle. We also talked about how Advent is about getting ready. Our story talked about Mary and Joseph getting ready for Jesus. We made a mobile about getting ready.