Check out what Mrs. Forbes did during her solo weeks.

Hello First Grade Families,

I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for allowing me this special time with your children.  I will have my last day at EMES on Tuesday, November 22nd.  Each of them are so very special and I have memories from all of them that I will always carry with me.  I would also like to thank all of the families for your warm and friendly reception and continued support through my student teaching at EMES.  To say that you are all awesome would be an understatement.

My two weeks of solo teaching have been amazing, the children have been eager learners and our days have been filled with literacy, math, social studies, science and fun!!

For literacy we have been worked on:                          

• reading comprehension strategies such as making a mental image, and text-to-self connections, along with reviewing old strategies previously taught. 
• word work of digraphs, two letters together than make one sound such as th, ck, wh, ch, and sh.
• word families ut, ap, at, op, and og
• sentence structure of starting a sentence with and upper case, spacing in between each word, and punctuation at the end. 
• expected independent reading behaviors
• editing stories by adding to the words and the pictures and publishing the stories with a title page and coloring in the pictures. 
• the strategy of sounding out a word using taping out each sound with their thumb and fingers
• “flexing” vowels, which means that each vowel has a long and a short sound
• looking for parts of a word that are already known

Along with all group instruction I have worked with literacy groups to support the strategies being taught. 

Some of the stories we shared are Memoirs of a Goldfish by Devin Scillian, There was an Old Lady who swallowed a Leave by Lucille Colan, How to Heal a Broken Wing by Graham, Corduroy’s Halloween by B.J. Hennessey and Don Freeman, Night in the Country by Cynthia Rylant, Scarecrow by Cynthia Rylant, How Full is Your Bucket? by Tom Rath, The Relatives Game by Ryland, The Kissing Hand by Penn, In The Woods:  Who's Been Here by L.B. George, Moonbear’s Shadow by F. Asch, and The Hungry Thing by J. Slepian.

During social studies we:

• started our map unit studying our neighborhood
• bird’s eye view, north, south, east, west and map legend
• watching hot-air balloon and helicopter ride videos and some still shots from a bird’s eye view
• looked at a stuffed animal and how it looks different when looking at it from different angles
• put items on our desks and drew maps of desks from a bird’s eye view
• looked at maps of neighborhoods, towns, and states
• Read Mapping Penny’s World by Loreen Leedy
• located the legend and north, south, east, west, and East Montpelier on a Vermont map 
• Read Me on the Map by Sweeney
• played Compass Corners, ask your children what this game is, they all seem to love playing it
• drew pictures of 15 different East Montpelier landmarks and shared them during the all-school morning meeting
• found our classroom on an EMES map and found our town on a Vermont map
• looked at each child’s house on Google Earth
• made bookmarks by completing a legend on a Vermont map of where East Montpelier is located

For math we:

• counted out ten each of five different butterfly life-cycle pastas which we then cooked and had an end of insect unit celebration
• filled designs with fewer and more shapes
• made “What’s my rule” posters using shapes
• talked about the different descriptions of triangles and that the corners are called vertices
• we explored with math games
• worked with number lines using a start with number and get to number
• found different ways to show having 9 items
• used cubes, counters and cups to determine what number of items were hiding
• practiced starting with one number and counted forward or backward to get to another number. 

For extra unexpected fun activities all the students were able to each received a book to keep at home from RIF, Reading Is Fundamental and we joined our fourth grade buddies and carved some pumpkins for the Monster Mash.

Again, I would like to thank all of you for an incredible and unforgettable experience!

Lisa