Happy February

Dear Families,

Happy February!

Things are going smoothly in our 1-2 classroom! As you know, we are between expeditions at the moment. We will be launching our next expedition on being healthy (shhhhh the kids don’t know yet) in mid-February. I am getting really excited about this expedition! As you might have heard from your child, I was at a literacy conference last week, and am brimming with ideas for incorporating reading and writing into this upcoming expedition. More on that in a few weeks . . .

Here’s what else is going on in our classroom right now:

-Reading Workshop: For reading workshop, we are learning to be metacognitive and monitor our thinking while reading. The students are becoming quite skilled at noticing their thoughts and connections during independent reading. We have talked about the different types of connections they can make when reading (text-self, text-text, and text-world). We have also discussed which connections are useful to us as readers (“Oh, I know how that character is feeling, that happened to me once”), and which ones are not as useful (“Hey, my cousin has a dog!”). We will soon be moving into making inferences and visualizing what we’re reading.

-Writing POETRY Workshop: We have just transformed ourselves into poets! We have been reading poetry for a few weeks now to get our brains ready for this event. Today was day 2 of our official exploration of poetry and the students have taken to it like bees to flowers. Yesterday we explored a variety of objects, and the students brainstormed new ways to describe those things. Today they continued brainstorming and then played with line breaks. We have also been reading poems chorally and in small groups. The kids particularly liked “Willie Ate a Worm Today” by Jack Prelutsky. They read this in small groups and then did mini performances of it.

-First Grade Math: In math, the first graders have been doing some data collecting. Did you know, for example, that 17 out of 21 first graders would rather be eagles than whales? After collecting class data, the students have been looking at different methods of representing this data. Today they came up with their own questions and then surveyed their peers. Tomorrow they will use their own preferred methods to represent this data.

A note on CREWmunications: You will begin to see a new format to the CREWmunications folders. The rubrics and book information will still be on the page, but I am reducing the reflection piece. I am hoping to begin consistently ending the day with a closing circle where students will share about something they did during the day, which you can then ask them about at home. I would appreciate your feedback on this!

Thank you so much for supporting our classroom! As always, if you have questions or concerns, please let me know.

Sincerely,

Lizzie Bromley-Vogel