Hello 1JB Families!!

Wow! Where does the time go! We are all soaking in these final short weeks of first grade in 1JB.

Important Dates:

UPCOMING FIELD TRIP!!!!! Check out this doc for information and parent sign-up.

Last day of school: June 7- 9:45-10:30 AM: K-2 Concert and Moving Up Ceremony (Meetinghouse)* families invited. 11 AM: Lower School Dismissal

Final Post Office information below: 

Keep reading to see what we’ve been up to!

Language Arts

Ask your child about the following phrase: Somebody, Wanted, But, So Then (SWBST).

Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then is a summarizing strategy to help students practice retelling in their own words.

Students first practiced this strategy with wordless picture books. While working with a partner students went through books to look for the SWBST.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During our next reading lesson, students listened closely to the story Corduroy. After hearing the story students used Somebody Wanted But So Then strategy to retell Corduroy in their own words.

Students then practiced this strategy with their own writing! Each student used the graphic organizer below to create their own stories. Once they wrote a story, they had the opportunity to share it with a partner and have their partner practice retelling! An important instruction for using this graphic organizer was that students had to write in full sentences for each section! For example, when writing in the W box students had to write something like, “Ted wanted to go to the beach.” instead of “the beach”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Social Emotional Learning/ Morning Meetings

An exciting component that we have added to our morning meetings is sharing positive affirmations about ourselves. Positive affirmations can give us a much-needed boost of self-esteem and put us on the road to a successful day! Here are some of the ones that students have been using:

To support students’ practice of positive affirmations they spent some time creating our own I Am, Positive Affirmation Jars. Ask your child about the affirmations they chose to write in their jar.

 

Math

1JB has continued their unit on time! We began looking at analog clocks and sharing our noticing. Students learned that the short hand points to the hour and the long hand points to the minute. We did different activities to help us learn that when the minute hand points to 12, it must be ____o’clock or ___:00. The next activities we did helped us learn that when the minute hand is at 6 and the hour hand is halfway between two numbers, it must be half past an hour or __:30. Another important component of time is counting by fives!

To help us practice reading both analog and digital clocks, students played time bingo!

Check out some other activities here: Time Resources

As we continued our conversation about measurement, but on Thursday we shifted the conversation to linear measurement! We began this unit by looking at things around the room and thinking about the length of different items. Students experienced measuring lengths with a ruler and other materials like pencils! We asked questions like “What is longer the rug or the table?”

Students walked around the room and measured different items and objects with a pencil. Students then had to record their data by saying which was longer, the object or their pencil.

FUNdations

In FUNdations, students learned about vowel consonant e words, also known as v-e.

When a word has a vowel consonant e at the end of a word it means the vowel is saying its name! Students learned that when a vowel says its name there must be a magic/silent e at the end of the word. For example, we used the following words to learn these sounds: Safe, Pete, Pine, Home, and Mule.

Check out the worksheets below for more practice:

Mark Current Concepts  

Vowel Consonant E Mark-Up

Students have also learned ALL the vowel teams. Ask your child to go through this poster with you!

Recent trick words: Nothing, none, friend, other, another

Partner Reading, Games, and Activity Time

Mix it up!! During activity time this week, we mixed it up and played games with partners. Ask your child: what game did you try? Was it a game you played before? Who did you play with?

Hello 1JB Families,

We can’t believe it’s already May! We also can’t believe the Post Office is officially closed. Students worked incredibly hard and should feel so proud of their post office success.

Important dates and reminders: 

Friday, May 10: Special Friends/Grandparents Day

Tuesday, May 14: Asian Culture Club hosts Lower School Students

Saturday, May 11: Spring Fair

Monday, May 13: Arabic Culture Night

May 14/15: Book Fair! Click here for the full Lower School Book Fair Schedule.

Sunday, May 19: Family event celebrating Jewish American History Month, Google form

Tuesday, May 21: Black Families at Friends, in connection with the Parents Association Diversity & Inclusion Committee, are hosting our first-ever community Black Excellence Celebration.

May is Mental Health Awareness Month which seeks to raise awareness and reduce stigma around mental illness and connecting to support. This year’s theme is *Take The Moment,* normalizing the practice of taking moments to prioritize mental health care without guilt or shame.

• Resources for the Lower School
• The Kids Mental Health Foundation
• The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt
• The 5 Principles of Parenting: Your Essential Guide to Raising Good Humans by Dr. Aliza Pressman
• Raising Good Humans: A Mindful Guide to Breaking the Cycle of Reactive Parenting and Raising Kind, Confident Kids by Hunter Clarke-Fields

Post Office

Final sales, counting our earnings, gathering mailboxes, and graphing letters sent! 1JB had a busy final week of the post office!

The end of the post office always brings up big feelings! Ask your child about how they feel about the post office being over. What memories feel special for them?

Counting our earnings!

Students worked hard on counting their total earnings from the post office. They found different ways to make a dollar, like 100 pennies, four quarters, ten dimes, etc! Ask your child about the different ways they formed a dollar.

Students were so proud when finding out their total amount. Ask your child about our total earnings!

We can’t wait to learn from the Upper School students about the organization we can donate to.

Closing Ceremony 

To celebrate the closing of the Post Office 1JB had a closing ceremony! We had a closing circle where everyone shared their favorite memory and job. After our circle, students received a Postal Worker Certificate!

Following the ceremony, students received their own 1JB Post Office Memory Book! This book is filled with writing down memories, favorite jobs, class visits, and stamp sales. Ask your child about the work they have completed in their memory book.

As a reminder, all these photos and MORE are located here.

Day of Service Activity

To help prepare for the day of service, 1JB discussed what the word service means. We read Amanda Gorman’s Something, Someday, and discussed that even though the main character was discouraged from solving a problem because it was too big to fix, he decided to make a change.

We then learned about Grassroots Grocery and community fridges. To help support Friends Seminary’s Day of Service, every student decorated a bag that will be filled with donated food!

Math

This week we started our unit on time! As we read the story, A Second Is A Hiccup we thought about the different units of time.

What is something you can do in a second? Clap, jump up and down once, say a word, spin around, etc. What is something you can do in a minute? Write a short sentence, sing a short song, and so on! We worked our way up to thinking about things that take an hour. Ask your child about these units of time.

How can you support your student’s understanding of time? Practice timing different activities (like brushing teeth or getting dressed in the morning) or talk about time daily with questions like “How long do you think it will take us to get from ____ to ____”.

Along with time, we have continued counting the days of school. With that, we have been making addition and subtraction equations to prove our thinking. For example: “If there have been 136 days of school, how many days till 140?” 136+4=140. Using these numbers we prove our thinking by saying that “140-136=4”.

Another element of our daily math has been using math equations to figure out how many days are left of school (sometimes these equations make us sad). This is a math problem you can do daily with your child as well!

Poetry 

To continue our poetry unit students learned about personification and shape poetry. When working on personification poems students picked an animal, object, or part of nature to bring to life. What would this animal/object say? How would it describe itself?

Here is an example of one of our practice poems:

Most recently students learned about shape poetry! A Shape poem (sometimes called a concrete poem) is a poem that has a visual appearance that matches the topic of the poem. The words in the poem take the shape of a poem’s subject. To create their own shape poem students picked something that connects to one of the four seasons (winter, spring, summer, or fall). 

Author Visit

Author and illustrator of Hot Dog, Doug Salati came to visit! We read aloud the amazing book with him and watched Doug sketch Hot Dog. What an exciting visit!

Art/Writing activity with Isabel

1JB had a special visit from Isabel who helped students with an exciting craft. Each student created a first-grade book to give to a Kindergartner. The books explained things that incoming first graders should know! Ask your child about what they included in their book.