Our Week Full of Feelings

Hello First Grade Famililes!


This week will be a little hard for me, personally, and for the class too.  We will be saying goodbye to two dear friends, Paz and Abdullah.  Each family is making a hard, but important decision, for one because of a long commute and for another to move to Northern California to be close to their extended family.  I wish these two beautiful families all the best.  

I wanted to share this here because I know each boy is connected to many of your students.  Your child may be experiencing some feelings of loss or sadness, so I hope knowing this can help you make this week special, taking the time for necessary discussions about how we process saying goodbye to a good friend.  Here are some photos we took together today to make a memory of the friendship we share!

Last week was full of many special moments of learning shared in our presentations.  I send out appreciations to each of you family members for sharing the experience with us and for showing such support.  It was lovely to hear parents commenting on other student's presentation and work.  This community support is what we are hoping to foster and keep growing.

Our journal experiences have been so beautiful lately.  The students have been writing much more and trying to incorporate more info in their diagrams that correlate with their questions or info.  The students are able to do all of this in less time now.  Each week's journal entries show their growth.  I hope you can take the time this week to look through your child's journal together.  


Today we had over half the class sharing one or two spelling word that they had memorized!  The enthusiasm here is genuine.  The students seem to be inspiring each other.  And it is also amazing to ask what experience made them chose the words they are memorizing, as well as to find out each student's memorization strategy.  I hope you are getting to share in the students' excitement about learning new words.

Here is a little glimpse of something we have been trying to fully understand.  Today we met for a moment before we took our time to practice equations to address a subtraction issue that has been coming up lately.  I asked every student to hold up five fingers.  Next I asked them to stay silent while everyone takes time to figure out my next challenge and to raise their hand if they have a question or comment after what I would say next and give time for all students to think.  Then I asked the students to take seven away from the five fingers.  


Many hands began to go up.  Some friends took some time to think this out. Next, we began to share our thoughts.  One friend asked how this could work.  A second friend said you cannot do this.  Another friend told the group that the answer would be zero, then showed taking down the five fingers.  This is the big question I hoped to bring to light!  Does this make sense?  5-7=0?   Other students shared that you couldn't take seven fingers out of the five you had.    Jenna used the word, "Impossible".  At this time in the student's mathematical understanding, we are not going into negative numbers, but are staying with concrete representation that they can understand right now.  This discussion helped more students begin to realize that when subtracting, we need a larger number as the beginning quantity.    We will continue to practice this so that our brains begin to have a fluid understanding of these symbols: + and - and be able to use them with ease when problems arise.


I want to get this published so you can know about our goodbye feelings today.  I will share more soon.  


Have a great night, Jennifer