Adding with 10's then 1's

We were so excited to begin our day by meeting our brand new student, Lillian, this morning!  We have been anxiously awaiting her arrival since last week.  We've already learned that Lillian loves to read and write stories.  She will be a perfect fit for our class.

We continued to write ___ing words and sentences in SWR.  It has been fun to see how many ___ing words we can use in one sentence.  We did a wonderful job tapping out our red words today- probably the best to date!  We are getting so good at remembering how to spell those tricky, need-to-know words.  I'm so impressed. 

During math we learned how to add larger numbers by using the 10's and 1's tricks.  We learned how to jump up or back by tens first, and then by ones.  If we want to add 63, we would jump up 6 10's and then 3 1's.  The first graders loved playing a new number grid game using this trick. 

The family in Little House had visitors today for the first time.  They were not invited guests, so we discussed how this made the family feel.  We also discussed how, if Pa had been home, the story might have changed a bit.  We really like thinking about how the story could be different if the author made a different choice.  It has helped us with our writing too. 

We read more about amphibians in science and continued to update our Non-Fiction Writing notebooks this afternoon.  We are learning about captions and photos.  Help your first grader notice captions at home!

I will be out of the room tomorrow working with all of the first grader teachers in the district on our curriculum.  I will have access to email and checking periodically.  If you have any immediate questions or concerns, please contact the office tomorrow.