Wow! We made it to Friday! What a fun week here in first grade. The children were wonderful. We played many getting to know you games this week. The most popular was the toilet paper game where each student took some toilet paper off the roll and had to tell us something about themselves for each square they took! They thought this was so funny! I enjoyed learning about favorite foods, and family members! When the kids came in on Monday they found their new islands! We are now at tables of four and they seem to be enjoying their new table mates. We have also been listening to soft music in the mornings as the kids unpack! We have been practicing long U this week and adding some unique words to our anchor chart. We will have a long vowel review next week. Many of the spelling words may be repeats that need to be practiced again! In math, we have been working on making and using numbers 11-19 and counting by tens. We have been using the foamy ten frames to count by tens for practice. We have also been beginning to talk about skip counting on a number chart. We will continue this topic into next week! I have really enjoyed watching everyone get excited about our quiet sustained reading time. We have talked about finding a comfortable quiet spot in the room to read. We have been listening to quiet music during this time and the kids really seem to enjoy it! Our buddies came in to work on a groundhog puppet and poem on Friday! We love when our buddies come! Next week we will work on Valentine cards for them. Thank you so much to our Guest readers this week, Mrs. Collette, Mr. Meyer and Mr. Stein. It is really wonderful to have so many parents as guest readers! In writing this week, we worked on continuing our writing. We explored writing for a longer length of time! I was thrilled with so many students diving into their writing journals. Next week we will jump right in with informational writing! Today, I sent home a list of students in our class for Valentines! Please make sure to send one in for every student if you will be making them! We will work on a mailbox next week so we are ready to deliver! You may send in Valentines any time! We also had many students participate in the Science Fair this week! The projects were awesome! Thanks to all the parents who put in so much time and energy! Enjoy the snow this weekend and stay warm! Jane NEW E-Mail: jfronheiser@bcsd.neric.org