March 18th-22nd

Happy Friday!  Wow...we had a very busy week in our classroom between learning how to tell time, working on our fictional writing piece for our passion project, and learning about Henri Matisse and recreating his artwork.  We were also excited for the start of spring and have enjoyed the sunshine at recess this week!

Reminders:

• If there is a change to the way your child is being dismissed in the afternoon (carpool, bus, after school enrichment class, etc.) and it is during the school day, please call the front desk and they will relay the message to me.  I am not always able to check my email during the day and I would hate to miss an afternoon dismissal change. 
• We encourage the students to eat their main food first (sandwich, pasta, burger, crackers/cheese, pizza, chicken, etc.) and then their other healthy items before any dessert like item.  Please keep this in mind as you are packing your child's lunch as we have to have lots of conversations of saving the treats until the end. 

April 11th 10:00 AM: Artist in Me Gallery Crawl.  The students will perform a song about each artist that we studied and then you will go on a scavenger hunt with your child to find all of their artwork.  You do not want to miss this so put it on your calendar! This event will be in our classroom.

April 15th-22nd: Spring Break

May 7th: Field trip to Emerald Hollow Mine. Go ahead and put this on your calendar if you would like to chaperone.  It will be an all day field trip (it is in Hiddenite, NC) and I will send more information as we get closer to the date.

Math:
We began a new math "cluster" this week as we began studying the clock and how to tell time.  In first grade, they learn to tell time to the hour and half hour.  If any students are successful with these two concepts, I challenge them by teaching them time to the quarter hour and down to the minute.  This past week we learned about the parts of a clock (face, hour hand, minute hand, large numbers that represent the hours, and the small lines that represent the minutes.)  We also focused on telling and writing time to the hour.  Students did great!  They completed activities where they had to read the time on an analog clock and write the time as "9:00" or "3:00" and activities where they had to read the number time and draw the hands on a clock.  Next week we will move onto time to the half hour.  Students also continued to work on our math number tiles that included subtraction, before/in between/after, and balancing numbers to 10.

Literacy:
This week during our passion project time, students wrote a fictional writing piece that had to do with their topic.  We also began teaching students about the editing process and how we were going to edit/revise each piece of writing they did.  After they finished their fictional piece, we called them over one by one and edited their writing.  We mainly edited capitalization, punctuation, sight words, and any words that were ineligible.  We will continue working on the editing process with them and soon they will be able to edit their own writing.  Once it is edited, they write their final draft in their best handwriting that will go into their bare book.  I also taught a lesson before our guided reading groups about looking for digraphs and blends in words that we are trying to decode.  I tried to help them realized that if they look for these letter chunks, it will help them sound out unknown words.  We came up with a huge list as a class that included ch, sh, wh, th, wr, br, bl, tr, ph, pl, sl, cl, cr, fr, etc.  We applied this to our guided reading books when reading on Tuesday.

Thematic:
We finished studying Pablo Picasso on Monday and began studying Henri Matisse!  We have some of the student's artwork hanging in the classroom already and it looks amazing! They are doing a great job with this unit.  Students rotated through two art centers this week as they had multiple steps to them.
1. Students recreated Matisse's famous painting of a goldfish bowl on a table in the corner of a room. Students learned to use a ruler to create their lines and learned how to make a drawing look 3-dimensional.  They used different art mediums (oil pastels and liquid watercolors) to create their painting and had to cut construction paper to finish the table and goldfish bowl.
2. We learned that Matisse loved paper cut-outs and reflections/inversions of shapes.  Students got to tie-die paper with liquid water colors and then cut out any shape they wanted to create a reflective piece of artwork.

We can't wait to share all of our artwork with you at the gallery crawl!  Have an awesome weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James