Happy Thanksgiving

Wishing all my first grade families a very happy Thanksgiving! I am thankful for each of you and hope you enjoy your day with the people you love! :)

Mayflower Books

We have been integrating social studies into Reader's Workshop this week to learn about the Pilgrims and the Mayflower. After reading several informational stories and creating class charts to highlight important information, we created these fact books filled with key facts about the Mayflower and the conditions on the ship. I hope you enjoying reading them when they came home today!

Thanksgiving Feast!

School internet is down

I just wanted to apologize to anyone that has tried to send an email but hasn't received a response  back from me. We have been having a lot of problems across the district with the internet and I have been unable to access my account at school. I will respond tonight from my home computer if anyone has sent me one! If there is anything urgent tomorrow, please call the school/send a note instead of emailing me just to ensure I get the message. Thanks!

Reader's Workshop: Characters

This week, we are knee deep in one of my favorite units of the year. Our mini lessons this month are centered on fiction stories and involve getting to know the characters we read about. Throughout the start of our unit, I have been using books full of small stories about one of my favorite characters: Poppleton! This pig has a lot of spunk to him, and the kids love listening to stories about him just as much as I love reading them.

Last week, we finished up learning about how readers get to know their characters. This anchor chart highlights the important things we learned: 

This week, we've started to dig deeper and are beginning to make inferences about our characters. This is important thinking for your child to engage in as they read. Today's lesson stressed the importance of using clues from the text to figure out what kind of character is in the story. 

We read a chapter together and did some of this great detective work about Poppleton, using clues from the text to support our thinking about what kind of traits would describe Poppleton. 

Finally, I gave the students a copy of the same chapter we read together and asked them to do some detective work about another character. They had to identify a trait to describe Patrick the Finch, and then use clues from the text to support their smart thinking!

You can support this at home as you read together! Encourage your child to tell what kind of person the character is and then ask: "What clues in the text make you think that?" This will help build comprehension and higher-order thinking!

Sneak Peek!

Today we got to see a sneak peek of our school's float for Saturday's parade. It looks incredible!! 

Here's the link to an article our float and school were featured in too. Check it out!

http://www.wickedlocal.com/plymouth/features/x1565412336/NATHANIEL-MORTON-ELEMENTARY-SCHOOL-Parade-float-celebrates-school-s-100th-anniversary

Thanksgiving Houses

This morning we took some time to share what our house, our nana's, our cousin's house etc. is filled with on Thanksgiving. We talked about our traditions and brainstormed what we love most about celebrating the holiday in these homes. Then, the students wrote responses to go along with a Thanksgiving house they made. In each window, we drew something that happens inside the house during Thanksgiving in each of the paper windows. We added a roof and chimney, then attached our writing to a little puff of smoke coming out of the chimney. They came out so cute!

Thank you to Mrs. Campbell (and Mrs. Egan from Mrs. Morgan's room too) for hanging the houses made by both classes! They look great thanks to you!

Exciting things are happening!

Two pieces of great news!! 

First, permission slips for a last minute school field trip to see the NMES float in the Thanksgiving parade should have gone home today. I am hoping the substitute sent them home for everyone! First grade will be going in the morning on Wednesday around 9:30. Please send back the slip tomorrow morning if you would like your child to attend. Thank you!

Also, our school will be featured on Channel 5 tomorrow morning at 6:00 for the "eye opener" shout out! The kids went into the gym today and waved to the cameras in the shape of a 100 (to celebrate our 100th birthday).  If you are awake, be sure to watch it! I'm going to DVR it so I can pause and rewind many times. :) 

I will be back tomorrow!

Hi families,

As your first grader probably shared with you, I was out of school both Friday and today. I will be back tomorrow though! If you sent any notes in either day that need to be addressed, I will be sure to read them and contact you tomorrow. Also, if your child turned in their reading log late and did not get it back, I will make sure it goes home tomorrow. I can provide extra time if needed to complete this week's assignment. Thanks for your patience! I'm looking forward to being back with the kids tomorrow. :)

Family Day!

Thank you to all the parents and families that came today to spend time in our classroom. We loved having you in and sharing our Writer's Workshop stories, playing math games, and reading with you. Many kids told me that today was awesome. One suggested I invite parents to come to school every day! ;)

 I'm posting below a bunch of the pictures I took- I just feel so lucky to have such wonderful families. Thanks again for being so supportive!