Homecoming Week!

Mrs. W
Sep 23, 2016
4 min read

We had another exciting week in room 13! Along with our learning, we had some fun events throughout the week to celebrate Prairie Homecoming 2016! Today was packed with celebrating! Thanks to our Crest PTO we all have new Prairie Crest T-shirts and tattoos. We also got to watch the homecoming parade this afternoon! Check out what else we have been up to this week!

Reading: Our shared reading story this week was "A Day at School". We focused on reading accurately at a good rate (not to fast, and not too slow). Our phonics focus was on short i (pin, fit, rip) and short o (pot, rot, pop). We also practiced stretching the sounds of short i and short o words and writing the letters that matched the sounds. During our read aloud time, we explored the differences between fiction and non-fiction books. We discovered fiction books are books that tell stories and often include made up things like animals talking. We also found out non-fiction books give us information about things and include real information and pictures.

Writing: We continued to focus on writing five star sentences in writing this week. We worked on revising our sentences to make sure they include all five stars (capitol letter, finger spaces, punctuation, who, and what). We are also going to start focusing on handwriting. Be on the look out for more information to be sent home on what you can do to help your first grader with their writing.

Math: We took our first math test this week to show off our knowledge on decomposing numbers within 10. Later in the week, we began exploring teen numbers. We learned that teen numbers are numbers 11-19 and they are numbers that have a group of ten and some ones. You can help you first grader at home by asking them to write their teen numbers and tell you how many tens and ones the number is! Next week we will learn about a new tool we will be using in math on the computers called Xtra Math. This website will help us learn our math facts quickly. It is a great website you can use at home to help your first grader as well! You should have received a note in your child's home folder about this. If you did not, please let me know and I can send another one!

If you want to use it at home follow this link:

Find your child's name and have them type in their password (it is 00 and their "magic number" so for example if their magic number is 12 their password would be 0012). Let me know if you have trouble or need help setting it up at home!

Science: We learned a lot about being a meteorologist and the tools they use to observe the weather. We learned about thermometers, rain gauges, and clouds. Below are some games you can play at home to help your first grader better understand what those tools do (click on the picture to go to the game)!

Social Emotional: This week we learned strategies to help ourselves ignore distractions and remember directions. We learned that you can use self talk as a tool. Self talk is quietly telling yourself something. We can use positive self talk to help us focus or feel better ("I can do this", "focus on the directions"). We can also use self talk to help remember directions given by quietly whispering the directions to ourselves over and over while we move from one thing to another.

Mrs. Wilaby's Weekly Words of Wisdom:

Each week I will be sharing a piece of wisdom with you that you can use at home. It might be sharing a website or app you can use with your first grader, or an idea of a game or other activity you can play at home. The idea is to give you a collection of strategies to use at home with your child to make the most of the time you have together at home.

This week's wisdom: Many of you have started to use Seesaw to see what your first grader is up to in our classroom. I love seeing that you are liking and commenting because it encourages your first grader to keep up the good work. Did you know you can leave a voice comment as well?! Although reading is a focus for us in first grade, many of our kiddos may find it hard at this time to read your comment you type to them. Next time, try leaving a voice comment in addition to your typed comment. This will help so that your first grader can independently know what you said and it will also work on reading skills because they will be able to read along with your comment! Here's how you do it:

1. Go to Seesaw and log in

2. View a post from your child.

3. Click on the comment button.

4. Click on the little microphone (make sure if you are doing this on a computer that Seesaw has access to your microphone)

5. Begin recording your audio message.

6. Click the green check mark in the corner of the box.

Need to Knows

Upcoming Events/Reminders

Prairie Crest Pre-Game Party – October 7 th 4:30-6:30

More information and RSVP at http://tinyurl.com/crestpregameparty

America Reads Day – Friday, October 21 st

Click here to sign up to read in our classroom! Be sure to sign-up by