Community Helpers

This past Thursday our classroom was visited by the community helpers we see above.  Amongst the students for the day we had a florist, a police officer, two veterinarians, a postal worker, and a fire fighter!  After learning about the different people who help out in our community this was a fun way to share what we learned.  The students each talked about the good things their community helper does during our morning meeting.

In reading we finished week 2 which themed on helping out.  This week our theme is on animal homes.  We have checked out many books from the library and are learning about the different places animals lives and some very different animals that share home.  We continue to study the summarizing skill (where we decided the most important part of the book and retell it in our own words) and main idea details (main idea- what the book is mostly about/ details- tell more about the main idea).  In phonics and spelling we are practicing identifying words with the /th/ /sh/ digraph and spelling words with those digraphs.  First grade words to know are: into, many, live, and out.  First grade spelling words for the week are: fish, ship, shop, thank, thin, and with. Kindergarten words to know this week are: all, am, are, at, and ate.  Kindergarten is currently practicing letters g and w.  

In science we are exploring the physical properties of the non-living things in our environment.  We are classifying things by size, shape, color, texture, weight and length.  W are using nonstandard units of measure, like paper chips and yarn to measure length.  We also got two brand new bucket balances to mesure the weight of items and then compare to different item's weights.  

In writing we continue to move forward and are working on incorporating a beginning, middle and end into each of our writings.  We are using similar sentences for the beginning and end to represents the main idea of our writing, what is is going to be about and then what we wrote about.  This will help keep of focused on the topic and let the reader see exactly what we wanted to share.

Looking forward to an other great week,

Miss Ellis' K-1 class