Peeling Apples!

Yesterday your children helped the PiE group peel apples for the Harvest Dinner! PiE is our parent group and PiE stands for Partners in Education. To prepare the apple crisp, PiE parent Doug Stewart asked student helpers to wash and peel apples.  Some students washed while others learned how to put the apples on the fancy peeling machines! As the machines peel, they also slice and core! Who knew peeling apples could be so much fun?

Word Sorts

Each day your child participates in a Fundations lesson. Fundations is our phonics/spelling program. Our whole group lessons include letter/sound review, sound dictation, word dictation and sentence dictation. In addition, proper letter formation is taught and encouraged. Each week your child is given a word sort. Children cut out their word cards, read each card and then sort them according to the spelling pattern being taught. Different groups of kids have different sorts based on student needs. The activities are the same for all, though. Each day students read the words and sort. Depending on the day, children may complete a Draw and Label activity or play a game with their words or read a passage similar words.

Here are some pictures of children working with their sort cards!

Read Aloud

I took some pictures today of the class listening to Miss Carey, our student teacher, read a story. I love their expressions and the intensity with which they listen to stories! Our author of the month is Bill Peet and Miss Carey is reading Merle, the High Flying Squirrel!  Bill Peet is a wonderful story teller and his stories hold the interest of children while incorporating rich vocabulary.  If you've never had the opportunity to read any of his stories, I encourage you to pick a few out at the library!

Community

Our theme at the beginning of the year is Community. We work hard to build a working classroom community that demonstrates the school's core values of sharing, trust, respect, responsibility and belonging. I read many books to the class about school, getting along with others and how to make and keep friends. After working together to build our classroom community, the class began to learn about Community Helpers. Our studies will include firefighters, garbage collectors, mail carriers, police officers, dentists, and construction workers. Each helper uses special tools and equipment. This week we spent some time learning about firefighters.

Today we had a visit from several of Hinesburg's volunteer fire department.  The firefighters talked to the first grade classes about fire safety and put on fire equipment including the noisy breathing masks.  Children were able to see how a firefighter might look in an emergency!  Afterward, each class was able to go outside and look inside a fire truck and see all of the equipment used by our firefighters.

Take a look at your children as they learned about fire safety!