Plants and Punctuation

Good Afternoon CFI Families!

This recap will be short as this week ended up being quite short in our time together with two half days. We have been exploring plants more this week and have seen our lima beans start to open and sprout. Here we are sketching them and documenting what changes we have seen. We have also read a variety of books about seeds and roots and have started asking questions like why can a cactus live in the desert when other plants can’t. We are excited to continue this study after the break with more planting, reading, and investigating the pictures you send in of unknown plants.

In our morning reading lesson, we have been focused on common word spelling patterns or word families. For example the -ight family or the -ide family. The kids have been great at thinking up lots of examples and have blown me away with some of the complex words they have thought up. For example with the -ine family they thought of brine, swine, and bovine. Wow! Stay tuned for how we continue to find more examples of each as we have already covered our entire whiteboard in word families.

In writing we have been exploring the ways punctuation can impact a sentence or even a story. We read the book Yo Yes and tried to fill in the punctuation because in that book there are very few words, but the punctuation conveys the meaning of the story. They got almost all of them right and used the pictures, size of the text, and inferences based on the story line to figure them out. They also brought up what choices the author had to make and have shared examples of punctuation from their own stories.

That’s all for our recap but here are some reminders and information about upcoming dates. I have put April 21st as our scholastic book order day so please send those in or place an order online if you would like to buy books. We also have the school book fair coming up.

As you saw there is a flyer in your child’s folder for the CFI family day at the Fireflies game. Please send these in if you are interested.

Our next field trip will be May 4th with the other first grade class to the Cottle Strawberry Farms to pick strawberries. This will be our culminating activity in our plant study. We will leave at 9:30 and return to CFI at 1:30. I will send home this field trip form when we return from spring break but here it is on our upcoming dates.

Please remember to collect your soil sample and plant picture over the break!

That’s all for now but take a look at our upcoming dates and have a great spring break!

Upcoming dates:

April 10th-14th- Spring Break

April 21st- Scholastic Book Orders Due

April 28th- Sandhills Library Trip and Final Gathering

May 4th- Field Trip to the Cottle Strawberry Farm

May 7th- CFI Family Day at the Fireflies game

May 12th- School Dance

May 26th- Sandhills Library Trip and Splash Day