IMPRESSIVE Paws for Reading Update and CARNIVAL

I was checking our Paws for Reading minutes tonight and I have to say (in the words of Junie B.) WOWIE WOW WOW!  I am so proud of my group of firsties for taking this challenge to heart and running with it.  Our first grade class alone has donated.....wait for it......81 books to needy families...in ONLY 2 WEEKS!  At home they have read for a total of 1,644 minutes!  This is absolutely phenomenal.  These are just the minutes of the individuals that have logged their minutes at home.  I know tomorrow I will have several more students that will turn in their reading logs and I in turn will log their minutes read.  Each time the students read for 20 minutes they donate a book to a needy family and (what they enjoy) they get to add a paw to our Paws for Reading bulletin board outside of our classroom. [Pic coming soon!]

 

This has been such a fun and exciting week of dressing up for homecoming spirit days.  I wish that I had brought my camera this week so I could have gotten some pictures of the kids in their pjs, hats, crazy socks, etc and captured their Pinto spirit.  I missed out on our class color day as I was in a meeting in Columbia [we learned some great stuff by the way], however, for future reference first grades class color is none other than PURPLE!  Next week, we will complete our mini grammar lessons by learning about verbs.  We will then continue on in our writer's workshop.  My goal is to meet with the students next week to develop writing goals.  In addition, we will continue reinforcing the strategies on our CAFE menu in reading.  We will discuss some new strategies that we will add to our fluency portion of our CAFE board.  In addition, we will discuss retelling and predictions.  Our next goal will be to learn about nonfiction features.  As you can see our CAFE board will contain many strategies the students can pull from each day as they are reading.  We never add a strategy up to the board and then forget about it completely.  We are continually monitoring our strategies and discussing them on a regular basis.  We will work with all strategies added throughout the entire school year. 

Next week, we will also begin chapter 2 in math which will focus more specifically on addition.  We will also review two more letters in spelling and handwriting.  We were not able to begin our science unit on habitats this week because we were still completing our unit on the American flag and The Pledge of Allegiance, so my goal will be to start our  new science unit next week.

DON'T FORGET about the PTO Carnival this Saturday (9/29) from 4-8:00pm.  First grade will have 3 booths open {lollipop tree, fish pond, hair flair} All tickets are .25 cents.  Proceeds will go to our CES teachers.  Please come out and support your local teachers.  This is a fabulous event that is always a fun and relatively cheap family night.  Concessions will be in the cafeteria so come and eat your supper at the school.  See you there!!!!