Highlights from a Great Week!

Hello families,

We have had such a fun week together. Our morning meetings are full of energy, sharing and learning about one another. We are learning our routines for getting setup for the day, talking about the calendar, and counting the days in school. We also focused on the social/emotional skill of asking for help this week. We talked about when we need to ask for help, how to ask for help, and role played to practice.

In reading we continued practicing read to myself and read to someone, gaining more and more stamina and reading more each day--past 10 minutes of sustained reading for each practice! We also focused on our volume, remembering to read using a whisper voice so as not to disturb others.

This week we visited the book fair and wrote our wish lists for books we found we liked. We also continued writing our Hopes and Dreams. Last week we wrote an academic goal: something we wanted to accomplish or learn about. This week we brainstormed and wrote a social goal: something we want to learn about doing or getting better at with people and friendships. We continued reading some books related to working towards our hopes and dreams. We read: Drawing Lessons from a Bear and Drum, Dream Girl.

In math we challenged ourselves to use what we've been learning about counting, organizing things into easy groups (5s, 10s), and representing numbers. We worked with partners for 2 days to count, organize and represent big collections of things: anywhere from 40-100 items! At first this was a big challenge but when we made a plan together as pairs and used our 10s Frames tools it really helped!

We also continue to learn routines and HEART expectations for places around the building (front office, nurse's office) and safety practices (fire drill, secure the building drill). The Fox Kits are doing a great job talking about and then modeling these expected behaviors.

We also played a fun team building game this week where we had to pass a ball around the circle without using our hands! We passed the ball using our: elbows, knees, and feet! It was hard but we encouraged each other saying "You can do it!" or "Give it a try!" or "Just do your best!" It was so funny and fun.

On Wednesday, our 15th day of school, we were excited to have filled our heart jar for the 2nd time this year already! This is just amazing. We celebrated on Thursday by having a craft/art project celebration.

This Friday, September 21st, is International Day of Peace. At J.F.K., we are participating in the Peace Crane Project, where students will create a paper crane, heart, or some other token of peace/thoughtfulness to send to our match school in Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates. On Wednesday we read the book Salam Alaikum: A Message of Peace by Harris J. This book is all about spreading peace and happiness to others. Then we made some 3-D hearts with colorful pictures and kind words to send as a part of the Peace Crane Project. On Friday we will bring them on our All School Meeting and put them in the box we will mail to our match school in Abu Dhabi. We look forward to seeing what messages of peace they send back to us!

Dates to Remember:

• Early Release Wednesday 10/17 at 12:15
• No School Friday 10/19
• Picture Re-take Day 10/26

Have a great weekend!
❤ Mrs. Fox

Highlights of the Week 9-14-18

Hello families,

It's been a busy week in room 25! We continued learning our routines and adding to them. We also filled our heart jar for the first time! We celebrated by having double recess on Wednesday! In our daily schedule we had guided discovery about more new things and routines too. Here are a few:

We learned about trash, recycling and composting from Ms. Jacie. 

We learned how to share, build, and clean up our blocks. The Fox Kits had fun building cool towers and contraptions together.

We practiced how to show HEART when using our lockers in the hallway.

We learned about how we do Community Cleaning. At the end of each week we clean our desks to organize our papers and wipe away the germs from the week. We also work together to clean and organize our room. We are a team taking care of our community space.

This week we read books about characters with hopes and dreams who had to work hard to make their dreams come true. We read: Dream Big, Little Pig; Happy Dreamer; Leo the Late Bloomer; and Drawing Lessons from a Bear.

We also began writing and drawing about our own hopes and dreams for first grade. We are writing about things we want to learn or get better at. Next week we will also be writing about friendship goals we have for the year.

A lot of kids talked about wanting to learn how to tie shoes so we got out our practice boards to try it together. A few kids already know how so they are helping to teach their classmates!

We finished illustrating the class rules that the kids came up with. Last week we had sorted them into our HEART matrix and this week we added illustrations.

We finally uncovered ALL the bookshelves in our room and learned about how to find a just right book. That's one that's not too easy and not too hard. It has some words we don't know but we can read most of the words. Practicing reading this kind of book will help our brain learn and grow.

In math we continue counting and organizing things into groups of 5 and 10 for easier counting. We began to practice counting on when playing "Double Compare"--adding two numbers together. Some students are counting all the visuals to add while others are beginning to keep one number in their head and count on from there.

We also talked a lot about listening during our morning meetings. We learned how to show whole body listening by: looking, leaning in, listening and thinking, and responding to the person talking.


Dates to Remember:

• Picture Day Monday 9/17 
• Book Fair 8:30-2:30 9/17 - 9/21
• Early Release Wednesday 9/19 at 12:15

Have a great weekend!
❤ Mrs. Fox

Highlights of Our First 2 Weeks!

Hello families,
We've had 2 great (short) weeks together getting used to routines, beginning some projects, and learning more about each other. Here are some things we did during our first two weeks.


Guided Discovery: This is a time we explore new materials in our classroom. We learn how and when we use them, where they belong, and how to take care of the materials responsibly.

• Classroom toys: blocks, legos, puzzles, animal toys, games, free draw paper, drawing books
• Math tools: cubes, 100 charts, 10s frames, number lines
• Sections of books in our classroom library
• Classroom Jobs
• Art supplies: pencils, crayons, scissors, glue sticks, markers, multicultural crayons, colored pencils
• How to show HEART in different places in our school (classroom, playground, cafeteria, hallway, bathrooms)

Math:

• Counting strategies
• We can organize our cubes or drawings in our representations to be more accurate and efficient in our counting.
• We made groups of ten on tens frames and counted efficiently by 10s to 100.
• Writing numbers to 100.

Projects:

• We read Mouse Paint and made a book about what colors our messy mice got into!
• We read Pete the Cat: Rocking in My School Shoes. Pete did different things in different parts of his school. We took a tour of our school looking at different parts and talking about what we do in those places. We made a big book, Fox Kits Rocking in Our JFK Shoes!
• We read The Colors of Us and Two Eyes, A Nose, and a Mouth and noticed how just like the people in the book we are all unique and make our community a beautiful and vibrant place. We sang a song on this theme and made self-portraits.
• We took ownership of our classroom and our fox kit community and began to decorate our space.

Mindfulness:

• Mindful coloring
• Breathing exercises (starfish/5-finger breathing, volcano breath, breathing ball)
• Loving Kindness practice for self-compassion

We also had our Kick-Off Event for CLiF (Children's Literacy Foundation) to celebrate The Year of the Book here at JFK. Each child in our class got to take home 1 book of their choosing to keep forever! Throughout the year we will have more events to celebrate reading and literacy skills. By the end of the year each child in our school will have 10 new books to keep forever!

Usually I will send out our highlights blog post on Fridays. I am sending this out to you on Thursday this week because this semester I am taking a class at UVM one Friday each month. I will be out for this class tomorrow, 9/7, but I know our class of little fox kits will do a great job with our guest teacher!


Dates to Remember:

• Picture Day Monday 9/17 
• Early Release Wednesday 9/19 at 12:15

Have a great weekend!
❤ Mrs. Fox

Thanks for a Great Year!

Dear families,

We had a wonderful last week together. This is a great group of kids and I will miss them next year!

Monday we had the whole school field day celebration. It was amazing. We designed some puzzle pieces, made a welcoming banner for next year's class, played kickball, made paper airplanes, colored with chalk, played with bubbles and hula hoops, raced on an inflatable bouncy-house style obstacle course, and played tons of yard games. It was so fun!

We finished making our first grade memory quilt this week. The students loved sharing their memories and representing them using their geometric knowledge and building skills.

We also thought back on our year together and wrote and drew pictures about our learning and memories in our class year book! There were some great class pictures in there too!

We read a few funny books this week: The Cat Who Wore a Pot on Her Head, Last Day Blues, My New Teacher and Me, and Little Critter: Just an Adventure at Sea.

We also did a lot of cleaning up the room and taking home projects and school work from the year. The students also helped to put back all the books we've read this year and make sure our classroom library bins are organized for next year!

On Wednesday afternoon we had one last 1st grade fun day where the first grade classes rotated through stations with each of the 1st grade teachers. They: danced with Ms. Johnson, made summer birthday cards with Mrs. Thompson, had snack and did some coloring with Mrs. Charron, and had freeze pops and colored with chalk with Mrs. Fox.

Friday was our last day of school. We had step-up day in the morning where the first graders visited their second grade classroom for next year. It was their first time gathering with their new classmates and teacher. They had a great time. Then we got to spend the rest of our short day together. We had one last celebration for filling our heart jar and enjoyed sharing time and favorite memories of the year.

I hope you all have a fantastic summer. Stop by and say hi at the back to school BBQ in August!

❤ Mrs. Fox