11/2 - 11/6

Happy November!

Parent Teachers Conferences are fast approaching.  With such uniqueness to our year, we are asking you to fill out the survey through the google form attached OR the paper copy being sent home today. We would like the survey to be filled out by Friday, November 6th to give us adequate time to prepare for meaningful time together. 

Survey Link

Link to sign up for conferences

Another thing being sent home is a student release form. I am starting the process of getting verified as a National Board certified teacher. Please read over the release and return it signed. Let me know if you have any questions!

Lastly, coming home today is some iReady test results from the first week of school. There is a letter that explains it further. Let me know if you have any questions!

Upcoming Events:

11/3: School Election! We will teach about the election process and hold our own mini election.

11/6: Fill out survey and return student release form

11/12: Virtual Conferences

11/17: Virtual Conferences

11/20: Early Release

A few photos from last week:

10/26 to 10/28

Hello,

Thank you for all of your patience and help for our first all virtual experience. I would love your feedback about how it went for your family. If you have a few minutes and wouldn't mind taking this quick questionnaire: https://forms.gle/Z3s3sGKMm9Xq91ws7. I would appreciate it!

Upcoming Events:

• October 26: Sweat Pants Day
• October 27: Wear Flannel/Plaid Day
• October 28: Wear costume or wear orange day

[Wearing costumes is something that is fairly new to NDLC! Please keep costumes school appropriate. It will also be important that the student’s face is not entirely covered.]

• NO School Thursday or Friday October 29th and 30th

Reading

We are starting to work on stopping to notice and jot down our thinking in reading. Students are adding post-it notes to their books so they can share their thoughts with peers, teachers, and families.  

Something you can encourage at home is when your student is reading, having them stop and retell what is happening  throughout the book. Students love the feeling of being able to read and start to speed read.  It’s important that they are checking in on their understanding. 

Writing

We are wrapping up our Poetry Unit.  The students will have a small celebration on Wednesday with fun Glow Sticks and Halloween Glasses.   They will bring their anthologies home then.  Please take time to celebrate their hard work when they bring them home. 

10/19 to 10/23

 Happy Monday Everyone!

Well, here we are! I just wanted to send a quick email with a couple important updates. I want to first start off by saying how truly grateful I am for all of your support. I am going to be doing everything in my power to make these next 5 days of learning as "normal" as possible for your child. With that said, I want to share with you what to expect for your child's schedule for tomorrow, and next week's virtual learning days. Here is a copy of the schedule in case you want to write it down or print it for your child. The schedule is VERY similar to our "in person" schedule. I want to make this as seamless as possible for your child, your family, and myself.

 

1. Please know that we are all going to do the best we can. It might not be perfect, but we will make it great!

 

2. Just a reminder, you can pick up your child's virtual learning materials today, if you have not already, at school so we are all ready to roll tomorrow morning!

 

3. Help your child find a quiet spot where they can work and set up their materials. I'm working on the same thing! Let them know we'll be live from 8:00 AM- 3:00 pm everyday, with many breaks in between!

 

4. A little bit of homework for the students today! Please watch these videos today (10/19/10):

• Here is a great book to listen to to get prepared.

• Here is a video from me that students and families can watch as well!

 

Rest assured, we have been building many virtual routines at school these first few weeks, so students will be very proficient at accessing materials! Here is a document to help you assist your child in logging in to certain things. Everything will be accessible through Google Classroom. Plan to have your child sign on Tuesday morning at 8:00 AM and I will take it from there!

 

If your schedule makes it difficult for your child to be live, please let me know. I can create a document with links to the lessons for you to view at a time that is convenient for you.

 

So for now...everyone take a deep breath...and let it out...we got this! (I might be talking to myself here, but I know it’ll be great!)

 

Please reach out with any questions.

 

Best,

Miss Wittmann

10/12-10/16

Hello,

Thank you to everyone for signing up for Seesaw! It is one platform that we will be using throughout the year. Now you will be notified when we post new videos in there. Let me know if you have any questions.

Also, we are going to start adding our spelling words of the week in the students agendas. There will be 5-10 words a week that we call snap words or trick words. They are trick words because you can't sound them out, they break rules, so we need to memorize them. We will get new words on Monday and then I will "test" them on Fridays. Each night if you want to spend a little time practicing the words, that would be great! Let me know if you have any questions.

Upcoming Events:

10/16: Book Orders Due, you can order online at https://clubs.scholastic.com/home our class code is QJMYM

10/29: No School

10/30: No School

Writing: Last week we started our Poetry Unit. We learned about seeing things through the eye of a poet (differently), using line breaks to create rhythm, and picking ideas that give us Big Feelings. The students are writing so many poems...they love it. This class is a group of natural poets. Reading: We continued our work as readers who are the boss of their reading...solving words quickly. We also worked on fluency. I refer to fluency with the class as: how our voice sounds when we read. We can sound like a reading STAR by: --sounding like the characters --using punctuation --sounding smoothly --thinking about the characters feelings and making our voice match

Math: Students are working hard at solving many different story problems. Story problems can be super tricky. It’s important that we read the problem, think what we know and what they are asking before we jump into solving them. We will be taking our first math assessment this week.

Content:

We have been immersing ourselves into learning about animals. We started by grouping animals that have similar characteristics. Then we delved deeper into those groups and noticed that even if they are the same species, animals can be quite different and have ways that they adapt to their surroundings. I included a few photos from creating our birdhouses. We had to keep in mind how different species of birds eat differently.

A few photos from last week:

10/5-10/9

Happy October!

I have been really enjoying this school year. It has been fun to get to know them in academics but also their personalities. 

This week I will be sending you an invite to our class Seesaw if you didn't get a chance to sign up yet. It is fun to be able to see little videos they post or activities that we complete. You will be notified when they add something new. You are also able to comment on their work.

Upcoming Events:

10/16: Book Orders Due, you can order online at https://clubs.scholastic.com/home our class code is QJMYM

10/29: No School

10/30: No School

Math:
Last week we spent a lot of our time learning story problems identified as comparison problems. These types of problems can be confusing because they use words like fewer than. We are working to help students read the math problem, stop and ask, “What do I know? What’s important? What type of problem is this? How will I solve this?” This week we will continue with different types of story problems and look to see if we have too much information, not enough information, and what type of problem it is.

Reading:
Last week we ended our unit with a celebration. We logged onto our Google Classroom with Mrs. Karls’ class and shared a book recommendation with each other. The students loved it! 

As we started our new unit on Word Solving we made a chart to remember all the strategies we learned in 1st grade. When your student is reading with you at home, let them be the boss of their reading: stopping at a tricky word and using 1 or more strategies to solve the word.