Sterling's Snippets: Our First Full Week

Well we made it! We survived the first full week of 1st grade and everyone (including myself) left with a smile. The students were able to dig into our content this week with lessons in reading, writing and math. They also had their first art and library skills classes. Mr. Carlson, our principal, and Mrs. Fillipi, our counselor, also visited the classroom for their first lessons of the school year. Mr. Carlson's lesson focus was student responsibilities, aligned with our school goals and mission statement. Today students participated in the bus safely lesson with our skilled drivers. They learned appropriate behavior when riding the bus, general safety and emergency exit procedures. Below Isaac is demonstrating how hard it is for a bus driver to see children if they stand right in front of the bus. Isaac was a great volunteer!

Even though we were learning about safety, we had a quick moment to snap a fun photo on the bus! The students were excited to be way in the back!

Finally students practiced exiting from an emergency exit in the rear of the bus. My wonderful listeners were a great audience for the guests! Here Tinah and Coby exit the bus.

A Peek at Our Week

Reading: In reading we are working with our new curriculum, ReadyGEN. The focus of our lessons has been story events and retelling. A unique piece of the curriculum is that students are given their own copies of the stories. The students love holding their own copy of Stellaluna in their hands. We learned to be detectives and read Stellaluna very carefully, citing text and picture evidence. The students' learned that this is called "Close Reading." In phonics, the consonants s, t, and m were reviewed as well as the short vowel a. We practiced making words with magnets and on white boards. The students also reviewed the sight words I, a and see. We worked in the students' reading notebooks by rainbow writing the words and using them in a sentence.

Writing: We began our first unit of writing this week with small moment stories, or personal narratives. I am so excited to see the students writing across pages with so many wonderful skills already in place. We reviewed the conventions of capitalization and punctuation. Students are also working on sounding out words and doing their best to spell.

Math: In math, students were introduced to our daily math routines, calendar and math tools. Students were given a new math tool daily that they will use for math this school year. We took some time to explore the math tools which was exciting for the students. It is so fun to hear the conversations and see collaborative learning taking place!