On the very first school day, I introduced the concept of Read to Self. Read to Self is a time where each student gets their own book box, finds a quiet learning spot in the room and reads! We have been working on building our stamina for Read to Self. The goal on the first day was three minutes--well this amazing group beat that easily and everyone read for five minutes! By Friday, we were reading for 12 minutes independently! Our goal is work up to 25 minutes and we are already half way there. Daily, we will practice Read to Self and after each session, we chart our stamina on a chart. This chart will help us keep track of our stamina and help us celebrate our milestones.
This summer I had the honor of attending the Writer’s Workshop conference at Columbia University with Ms. Meck. The whole week I found myself in awe of what first grade writers could do. The conference inspired me to really focus on my writing instruction this year. Our first unit focuses on “small moments” true stories that have happened in our lives. This might include a story about getting hit in the eye at baseball practice or scrapping a nose on the way to school. This week, we learned that as writers, we have tons of stories to tell about our lives, that small moments are happening all the time to us. The enthusiasm that is catching on about our small moment stories is astounding. During writing time, our class becomes a story factory and then even after writing, we are constantly saying to each other “Hey, that’s a small moment story that just happened to you!” I am excited to see where our writing takes us.
Information about the upcoming week:
- This week we will have PE on Monday, I will bring the students out from the gym and we will dismiss from where we line up. We will dismiss from this spot Monday/Wednesday/Friday and on Tuesday/Thursday we will dismiss from in front of the tree house since we will be coming from art
- We will have library alternating with PE on Monday. On the weeks where we have PE on Monday, we will have library on Thursdays from 1:30-2:00. I will update our class calendar soon with the information.
- If you have not yet sent back the black writing folder with pictures, please do so.
- Please make sure to send your student with a healthy snack daily.
Thank you for your support,
Ms. Smith