Our First Grade Journey

Cicada Crew Families,  We are in the fourth quarter of our first grade year and I can hardly believe we are already at this point. I am grateful for the opportunity to learn alongside your students and yourselves throughout this school year as we work together in the classroom. I am thankful for our Cicada Crew Family!  3 of our chicks- Bo, Peep, and Lego Author Expert Projects  Please see the criteria attached to the email. This was also sent home in folders.  Here is our Laura Numeroff poster display that we made as a class. They were so excited to research and share their learning! We chose to illustrate everything by hand, but feel free to use a printer to print photos of your child's author. This is a great opportunity for your child to continue to grow as a writer, so thank you for giving them the space to write and not type their project.  Staggered Due Dates:  Tuesday, April 16th: Jacob, Izzy, Madison, Alex, Parker Wednesday, April 17th: Logan, Reag...

As readers , we’ve been studying the author, Laura Numeroff. You may have heard of her from the books, If You Give the Mouse a Cookie . We have noticed different patterns and her stories, common themes, and different parts of her authors craft. We look forward to writing a book similar to her, as this is a model to the children of what they will do in their own expert projects.  Author Expert Projects  We are going to be choosing authors and inquiring into their stories, their craft, and their lives. These will be called our Author Expert Projects, and you will receive more information and criteria next week. Please talk with your child and have them choose an author they would like to study. This could be someone who they enjoy reading stories by, or someone they've never heard of!  The author selection will be first come first serve. Please email me by Tuesday, March 19th, with your child's top 2 selections. (I will choose the choice that is available).  As writers...

Cicada Crew Families, We have been hard at work inquiring into the night sky, biographies, informational texts, and clocks!  For this blog, I wanted to provide you with some context of our learning so that you can continue some of the learning in the classroom at home.  Reading   The weekly reader that was sent home today was "Monkey to the Top". This is a Level F reader, which is about a DRA level 10 (about where we are at this point in First Grade). You may notice that there may be more dependence on sight words and that the pictures give less cues than past books we have sent home. This is a great time to continue practicing those sight words and pointing to the sounds in unknown words. We have been discussing what to do when we come across unknown words, and a lot of us have gone towards chunking by looking for familiar words and blends. You may have seen the Fireflies Reading Plan that was sent home today. This is an awesome way to get your child excited about readin...

  Cicada Crew Families,  You may have noticed that there was not a weekly packet for this week. I apologize as our school printer was down and we were unable to print. We still sent home a weekly reader, Animals, Animals. Thank you for continuing to read and practice sight words alongside your reader as they continue to grow in their reading fluency! Biographies  As we have been honoring and celebrating Black History Month, we have begun an inquiry into nonfiction texts. We have started exploring nonfiction text features and genres, such as biographies. As we've looked into biographies, we have found headings, table of contents, facts, photos, and timelines. A few people we have learned about as we've read their biographies are Jackie Robinson, Mary Walker, Stephen Curry, Rosa Parks, Harriet Tubman, and Serena Williams. As we've been reading nonfiction texts, we've also been writing biographies to reflect the facts that we've learned about these people who have made...