Happy Monday! I would like to start this week off by saying how grateful I am for all of you. You are truly wonderful and I am so lucky to have you in my life and have the opportunity to spend time with your child. I love watching them grow and learn each day. So thank you from the bottom of my heart! Social Studies: Holiday Lessons We focus on the theme of family in first grade social studies. So far we have explored how families are alike and different and how families change over time. For the holidays, we are going to learn about different family holiday traditions. We will explore fall and winter holidays from around the world and compare them to how our own families celebrate at this time of the year. All holidays tend to feature gatherings and food, and the use of lights as decorations and in ceremonies is another common thread. My goal is for our students for them to understand that there are a lot of different ways to celebrate. The social studies state standard address by these activities is “Use components of culture to describe diversity in family life.” With that in mind, please consider sharing with me if your family has unique or interesting traditions that we could learn about in class. I will never ask a student to act as a representative of a particular culture, but it is helpful for me to have an idea of what our students’ holiday traditions are. For example, if Santa does not come to your house, that is good for me to know, so that I can discreetly guide Santa discussions in a positive way for all kids. I have resources available to address Diwali, Hanukkah, Christmas, Las Posadas, Kwanzaa, and the Lunar New Year. If there are other fall or winter holidays that we could include, please let me know. Again, the students don’t learn many details about each holiday, just by whom and why they are celebrated, what families do and eat at the celebrations, and if lights are used in the festivities. With this in mind, we will do projects, crafts, and games from a variety of cultures throughout December rather than focus our class celebration on one particular day. We have parent volunteers scheduled most days in December and this will allow us to try many interesting and fun activities. On the morning of December 20th we will get cozy with a movie and pajama party (details to come). Kindness Elf I wanted to share with you that we will have an elf in our classroom that will come to visit us on 12/3. He will be our kindness elf. Each day our elf will be hiding in a new spot and will have a new random act of kindness for students to do. I have sent home a note with this information as well. Please look for it in their Frog Binders. Math: We will continue to work on addition and subtraction story problems. We are learning to always show our work and label our answers. Reading: We will continue to work on looking at parts of the word we know. We can break apart words and look at all the parts until we know the word. We will continue to look at the following questions:
Science: We are continuing looking at animals and how they use their parts to survive. we have talked about Sea Turtles, Penguins, Pill Bugs and Whales. In order to celebrate this far we will be watching a movie tomorrow Tuesday November 26th. We will be watching Happy Feet Rated PG and having popcorn. If you would like to your child to not have popcorn or watch the movie, please let me know. Phonics: We are going to continue to look at long vowels with the magic e and start to look at vowel teams. Our Holiday party is on 12/20. We are in need of volunteers to bring in supplies. Click the link to check it out. www.signupgenius.com/go/5080C4AACAA29A5F49-polar Have a relaxing and amazing Thanksgiving break! Ms. Weaver Comments are closed.
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