Friday, December 4, 2015

Notes from Mrs. Brower

It has been a delight to stand in for Ben while he is on paternity leave. We have launched a study of holiday traditions in various cultures, and have read several books on that topic. Thanks to all you families for helping your child complete the holiday traditions interview form. Now that they are all returned to school, we can begin to use them as the basis for writing a report.

We have been talking about writing to inform, and are learning to use a tool called the Painted Essay. It is a way of learning the parts of a report (Introduction, Point One, Point Two, Conclusion) and to help us understand and remember those parts by associating each with a color. First we read about each part and colored the template with colored pencils. Today, we will actually paint another graphic organizer with watercolors. Next week, we will finalize our report topics and we’ll use planning sheets with those four colored blocks to write notes in each part.


The first graders have been practicing making ten with the rods, adding numbers plus one and numbers plus ten, and using number lines for addition. We gave a short quiz on the plus one and plus ten facts yesterday. I plan to send a practice page home with some of the first graders who need to practice adding ten to a number. The second grade math notes can be found by going to Theresa Fox’s blog: http://mstheresa-rumney.blogspot.com/p/math.html

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