Friday, April 10

We have had a busy week of reading! We read for 120 minutes to complete our Read-a-thon promise! There was a lot measuring going on this weekend as well! Please keep up the hard work and check the pages to see what we will be working on next week! Enjoy the sunshine this weekend!

Friday, March 27

Here is a peek at some of the things we did on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday!

Story Structure

 2nd Grade Music Performance

2nd Grade Music Performance

Movie Celebration

We have had a busy week before spring break. We ended today with a celebration at Oak Crest for the Read-a-Thon. We will be reading each day during morning meeting when we come back from break. Each day will have a theme to go with it.

Monday: Hat Day

Tuesday: Beach Day

Wednesday: Campfire Day

Thursday: Sports Day

Friday: PJ Day

Have a relaxing and rejuvenating week off!

Tuesday, March 24

Today we had a special visit from the Minnesota Zoomobile! The kiddos got to hear stories about animals and they were introduced to the Mexican Red-kneed Tarantula, a Rabbit named Zoe, and a Great-horned Owl named Cricket. Ask your child about these animals tonight.

We also practiced using rulers today and we read about Frog and Toad and the Garden. Ask your child what seeds need to grow! Have a great night!

Monday, March 23

Winter wanted to make another appearance it seems! The snow made our morning go very fast, hopefully it will melt fast too! We are going to be working on r-Controlled Vowels this week. We started today off with the ar sound. As we go through the week we will be adding or and ore to the list. We will also be talking about gardens and what grows in them, what we need to grow plants and what we use them for. Have a great night!

Monday, March 16

Good Monday! I hope everyone had a fantastic St. Patrick's Day weekend in Belle Plaine! I am excited to share the actual holiday with some of you tomorrow at parent-teacher conferences. We have been working really hard on 2-digit addition over the last week and today we used 2-digit addition with story problems. Everyone is working very hard on this concept. We will take our test on this and on using pennies, nickels and dimes on Wednesday. 

We are so lucky to have our therapy dogs that come in once a week. They made a special trip to our classroom today since they will be busy on Thursday. 

We even had a guest dog, Ricky. He is a Chinese Crested. They ladies have mentioned that they have seen huge gains in the confidence of all of the readers in this classroom! Yay for working hard.

In reading we started working on compound words today. We have been talking a lot about syllables lately in hopes of getting everyone ready for these compound words. At home you can work on breaking words apart into their syllable by clapping them out. I would also suggest writing the word (or having your child write the word) and putting a slash between the syllables (ie. cup/cake). This will help him/her visualize the two words that make up the compound word.

Friday, March 6

We have been working on money since Wednesday and using different coin combinations to make numbers. This skill is very tricky! In first grade the goal is to master using dimes, nickels, and pennies, knowing how much each is worth, and how many it takes to make a dollar. Our reading this week was really fun. We pulled in some Dr. Suess for Author's Purpose and the kids really enjoy Dr. Suess books.
This morning we introduced our students to the Read-a-Thon Fundraiser. We are excited to try this fundraiser out since it encourages kiddos to read to raise money. There is a letter on the envelope going home with kids explaining how it works and what we will be doing with the money. This is a k-6 event so Oak Crest came over this morning to learn about it with us. We had the Belle Plaine Tiger come and cheer us on and all of a sudden we had a flashmob! Ask your child about this....it was probably their favorite part!

This afternoon we worked on our pot of gold and wrote about who is worth more than gold to us.

You can go to the Chatfield Elementary Facebook page and check out the whole fundraiser announcement and see the flashmob. Remember to check out the pages section to see what we will be doing next week. Have a great weekend and enjoy the weather!

Monday, March 2

Wow! Last week flew by! I didn't even post once! Sorry about that! Here are some pictures of our readers from last week.

We worked really hard on the long e sound all week. We are making some big progress in our reading and it is exciting to see! We also started working on telling time and using calendars to help with time as well. Below is just a quick picture of an assessment that I did with the students. Everyone is really trying and time is a difficult concept. Keep practicing at home!

There is a letter in your child's backpack today that says we are going to be doing a reading challenge for the month of March. We are trying to earn a pajama/movie day and we thought that reading at home would be a great way to do it! Have a great week!

Friday, February 20

We started with the shoe greeting which is probably my students favorite greeting to do. Then we shared about our exciting weekend ahead. It sounds like many fun things will be happening. After that we went off to tiger time. When we got back, we started working on telling time. If you notice, your child is bringing home an analog clock to practice telling time on. First graders are expected to master telling time to the hour and half-hour on both digital and analog clocks This is a really tricky concept so please continue to work on it at home. We will be working on it all of next week as well.

Then we tested our spelling skills on the long o and long u sounds. This also proved to be tricky. Keep working hard on these skills at home to help your child learn these phonetic skills. These skills will carry over into his/her reading. We also talked about the suffixes -y and -ful this afternoon and did a little word sort and writing using words with these suffixes.

Finally this afternoon we did a writing about hot chocolate. We wrote about how, where, when and who with we like to drink hot chocolate. Then we made it into an art project. As a special treat, we enjoyed some hot chocolate while listening to our guest readers. Stay warm and have a great weekend! Remember to check the pages for what we will be up to next week!

Wednesday, February 18

So here are some pictures of our most recent guest readers from our classroom and yesterdays guest reader from the community. Mayor Mike Pingalore joined us and read us a great story about liking ourselves.

 This morning we were able to go watch the Begindergarten students practice their program for their parents. These kiddos were sure impressive to watch!

 And finally, here are a few pictures of the delivery of Valentine's from Friday!

Have a fantastic evening!