A Halloween Montage

An observation of Veteran's Day granted us an extended weekend and the next two and half weeks will be include the next level of growth leading up to the end of the first trimester, and Thanksgiving break. Game Day for Unit 3 will happen this Tuesday, November 10 with Unit 4 in reading and math beginning the next day. I understand there have been some students that have missed multiple days of school but everyone has done a great job keeping up with missed work. Thank you parents for taking such strong initiative in keeping your child connected with classroom content!

Thanks to those of you that sent pictures in from the Halloween celebration and art appreciation. You will be able to see some shots from Room 108 in the slideshow on the right hand sidebar. I created a simple video montage video using iMovie. The song choice was inspired by the recent theatre release of the Michael Jackson movie This Is It. I had a chance to see the movie and it was inspiring in the sense that Michael Jackson really was a tremendously talented entertainer who nearly perfected the art of performance. Thriller also has an eerily familiar Halloween feel. Enjoy!

Is It November Already?

Rain, rain go away and come again another day! If you don't we don't care, we'll just move our Halloween parade inside and still have a great time! Thank you everyone that came out for the Room 108 Halloween Celebration and for adapting with us to have the All-School Parade indoors. The costumes were classic, creative and some a bit spooky but what was clear was the energy and enjoyment beaming from students (and even some parents!) Hopefully the excitement continued through the holiday weekend for you all and will help carry us through the short, four-day week.

Looking ahead to the week, Unit 3 in Everyday Math and Open Court Reading will wrap up with the introduction of a few new skills and some review, before culminating in a Game Day on Tuesday, November 10. Math will include time telling to the half hour, introduction of the dime, continued coin counting practice, and number grid counting. Phonics skills will continue to focus on digraphs; two letter combinations that make one sound, like ch-, th-, sh-, ar, er, ir. Reading strategies will focus on summarizing, visualizing, and making connections.

Science and social studies will continue to alternate days and weeks. Science will still use organisms as a basis for observations, inference, and sorting skills while we continue to learn about the subject of science and it's embedded nature throughout the world around us. Social studies will keep on with geography skills like reading cardinal directions, using map keys, and following directions. We will also begin reading out of the Unit 2 big book titled, "Our Community."

In closing this week I will leave you with a link to the time telling game students played in the computer lab last week. The game is called "STOP THE CLOCK" and children need to match digital clocks to analog clock times to stop the clock in the quickest amount of time possible. We were working on telling time to the half hour, but if your child has a firm grasp of the half hour, your might challenge them with clocks to the quarter hours. This link, and more new links, are available under the "Math Maniac Links" section on the right hand side of the blog.

Things That Go, And Go, And Go!

Chugga, Chugga Choo, Choo!! The Room 108 Team keeps on the train through the end of October and whirlwind of action happening all around us! Last week was a busy one with conferences, book fair, and two half days of school. On Friday, many students participated in the New Era sponsored Wear Your Cap to School Day that raised money for the Caps For Kids foundation. Also on Friday we were all treated to an Art Appreciation lesson on Alexander "Sandy" Calder. The children were shown some superior pieces of Sandy's work and focused on his most popular creation, the mobile. Students were then given an opportunity to build their own fall inspired mobiles with sticks and leaves from trees, along with many other building items such as paper clips, pipe cleaners, and chop sticks.

Thanks to all the parents for all you did this week! Parent/teacher conferences ran very smoothly because of the punctuality and participation from those of you that were able to make it. The book fair was also a great success and students were thrilled to share book purchases with all their classmates! The art appreciation moms did an excellent job in promoting the work of Sandy Calder and helping children make inspired and very original mobiles!

This Friday, October 30th is another great chance to get involved in the classroom because we are having a Halloween Celebration! In addition, Mann is having an All-School Halloween Parade! It should be quite the costuming masquerade! Parents are encouraged to help out with the classroom party and attend the parade around the school block.

Unit 3 Underway

Hey Readers! With parent teacher conferences just around the corner, Unit 2 has been completed and Unit 3 in reading and math is underway. The challenge with the early months of first grade is that no one skill is taught to mastery meaning skills are merely introduced or reviewed before new concepts and skills are introduced again. Just about every concept, skill, strategy, and procedure in math and language arts is a foundational skill by which students will build further thinking, understanding, and application.

If you have been checking in on your child's Mail folder you should see the (almost daily) math home links and decodable books. When a new unit begins, there is a unit overview from Everyday Math that is sent home and it has no homework attached to it. That overview is for grown-ups to have an idea of the concepts and skills that will be introduced and worked on in the next unit. Some days flow more smoothly than others and in some cases, math gets squeezed at the end of the day and home links are a great way for your child to connect what they did cover in school with you at home. The same goes for decodable books, some days we focus on specific phonetic skills with other days being treated as review days. Typically what you see in your child's Mail folder is a snapshot of topics, concepts, skills and/or activities that took place that day. If you see nothing in their folder, that means most of the day involved whole class lessons with workbook and collected forms of assessment.

Keep your schedules up to date with the Upcoming Events section in the right hand column and thanks for sending your children to school with such great looking outfits and smiles for picture day! See you on the blacktop!

Walk to School Week

Hey Everyone! This week is Walk to School Week at Mann! This is a great chance for children to learn about the importance of conservation, waste-reduction, and well-being practices. Along with activities in the classroom and special area classes, students are encouraged to walk and bike (and scooter) to school to help eliminate using vehicles, which use nonrenewable resources to operate and put pollutants into the air. Below is a list of colors and themes for each day of the week. Be sure to encourage your child's participation in this great week! It may be a challenge for some but your effort in immeasurably appreciated (by humans and the Earth.)

Monday, October 5^th: Students (and staff if they want to!) wear red for transportation safety and receive a hand stamp for walking to school.

Tuesday, October 6^th: Students wear blue for water conservation and receive a book mark for walking to school.

Wednesday, October 7^th (the official international walk to school day): Students wear green for the earth, come to school in “walking school buses” and receive a treat from Active Transportation Alliance and Whole Foods. At lunch time a 6’ evergreen tree will be planted behind the school by Hoy Landscaping. The students can watch the planting process during recess.

Thursday, October 8^th: Students wear yellow for energy conservation and receive Mann Moolah for smoothies. At lunch time students will be rewarded with a hand stamp for bringing a zero waste lunch to school (using all recyclable containers with nothing ending up in a landfill).

Friday, October 9^th: Students wear their favorite sports team for physical activity and receive a reusable container with a treat inside for walking to school. These containers are to be taken home for reuse and should not be thrown away!

“Walking School Buses” will also happen on Wednesday, October 14, 21 and 28

Thanks to the Parents of Mann School for putting all of this together!!!

Four-Square Writing

The four-square writing method can be used at almost every elementary level and can even be creatively adapted for middle school or high school writers. For first grade it helps to model writing at it's most basic level; combining words to make a sentence. With the fall season here, and weather as one of our science topics, students in Room 108 brainstormed together around the "fall" topic. Below are two examples of student work from our four-square writing activity. The front side is the brainstorm activity, done as a class. The topic "fall" is in the circle with the four squares identifying how fall looks, feels, smells, and things they like to do.

The second image is the reverse side of the four-square, which is completed independently. Each box is numbered on both sides so children know which box they are writing in when they are flipping back and forth. Each square on the reverse challenges students to piece together the words from the brainstorm into complete sentences with a capital letter and punctuation mark. For the "fall" topic, three of the four sentences begin with the word fall. When a sentence is complete, children are then to draw a picture that illustrates the sentence for the box.

The two images combine for a great example of a finished product from a four-square writing lesson. The two pictures are from two different students and show that students are not creating the same four sentences. The whole class brainstorm offers student to pick words and create sentences unique to their interpretation of the topic. In this case you can see that in square number four, one student likes to jump into leaf piles in the fall while the other likes to ride bike in the fall. Four-square writing requires an extended amount of student focus, effort, critical thinking and creativity about a topic. The fall four-square writing was a great success!