Pre-Conference 2019

This blog is going to be short and focused on just a couple of upcoming events, so let's get to it...

Walk to School Day:  Walk to School Day is this Wednesday, October 2nd.  If your chid is rides the bus they will need the permission slip that went home today signed. They will keep this slip in their agendas and give it to their bus driver on Wednesday morning. Kids with signed permission slips will be dropped off at the Flagstaff Armory/National Guard Center on Thorpe to walk to school with one of our many adult volunteers. If your child is normally a parent drop off you may also drop your child off at the Armory, no sooner than 8 am, to walk to Marshall. If you wish, you may also walk to school with your child. Children who normally walk to school from nearby neighborhoods may just follow their normal routines. Any and all walkers will be recognized and counted, and will receive a prize for walking to school! We hope to see everyone out walking to school this Wednesday!

Parent/Teacher Conferences: Our first draft of the conference schedule went home today. This is the list of everyone who had returned their sign up saying they would like a conference next week. If you would like a conference, but do not see your child's name on the list please pick 1 or 2 remaining spots and return to me ASAP. I will let you know your conference spot by the end of the week. Again, remaining spots will be given on a first come first serve basis. I am hoping to meet with everyone for this first round of conferences! Conferences are next week, Monday-Wednesday, with early release all 3 days. Monday and Tuesday are 12:25 release, and Wednesday is 11:10 am.

Fall Break: Following conferences we will have a four day fall break. School will be closed Thursday, October 10th and Friday, October 11th. 🍂🍁🍃

Thank you for forgiving to short and to the point blog. Anyone else feeling extra busy? Next week we should be back to normal. -Ms. Shaw

Mustang Gallop 20219

Happy Autumnal Equinox room 9 families.  I am so happy that the cooler weather is here. Please make sure that your child dresses appropriately for our fun Flagstaff fall weather. This might mean longer pants and a small jacket for the morning time. Layers might be a good idea, as well as closed toe shoes. It is a difficult time to try and dress for our daily fluctuating temperatures for sure. I myself would rather be in pj's and barefoot! Anyway, here is what we have happening this week...

Math:  This week is all about understanding the equal sign and the commutative property of addition (which, in first grade,  we call the flip flop property as well). This simply means that we understand that it does not matter which order our addends are in as long as they are they same (ex: 3+2 = 2+3). 

ELA: We are beginning Unit 2 of our NatGeo curriculum, so the next four weeks our stories will be about plants and what is living vs. non living. In grammar we will be incorporating plants with a strategy called four picture story frame. Every day the students will have a new picture about the plant lifecycle and they will use their parts of speech to create a sentence about the picture. By the end of the week they will have a paragraph about the lifecycle of a plant. In spelling we are working on qu, y, and short u. 

Science:  Tying in with our ELA, we will begin our plant unit. We will ask "What happens to seeds in moist soil?" and then record our hypothesis. After that we finally get to plant and observe. We will also start to look at how seeds travel.

Marshall Gallop:  Friday is our big gallop day! That's right, we run on Friday! The theme this year is Lunar Launch. We are going to be the Shaw's Shooting Stars. We run from 9:30-9:50, and all are welcome to come join. Please make sure your child has a water bottle for the day! After your child runs their laps we will send home the amount of laps they ran so that you may collect from those who have pledged money per lap. It is perfectly fine to still be collecting flat rates at this point as well. Pledge packets are not due back until October 4th, I believe. The Gallop is not the day we collect these, it is only our day to run and determine laps for those who have chosen to pay per lap. Please remember that this is our only fundraiser of the year and that all money goes directly back to Marshall PTO. Just like this year, their plans for next year is to use the money from this fundraiser to pay for EVERY students back to school supplies at the beginning of next year! I know this saves our families and staff so much money out of pocket at the beginning of the year, and this is so unheard of in a public school! Let's help our PTO continue to be able to make this a possibility for our families and go collect those pledges!

Illness Guidelines:  Cold and flu season is upon us, and room 9 seems to have taken a hit. We have a large number of sick kiddos. Just wanted to put out a friendly reminder of when to keep your child home so that we do not continue to spread this around. In order to be at school your child must be 24 hours fever free off of medicine. They must be 24 hours from their last bout of vomit and/or diarrhea. If they are not, please keep them home. Please help our littles learn to cough into their elbows and not into the air. Please help our first graders learn to blow their noses and promptly throw away the Kleenex, not leave it on tables or floors. They are still getting the hang of these things, but we need to work together on reminding them so that we may all stay healthy. Thank you!

Parent/Teacher Conferences: Parent/Teacher Conferences are Monday, October 7th-Wednesday, October 9th. I will be sending home a paper Conference sign up sheet by Wednesday at the latest. Please choose 2-3 spots that would work best for you and return ASAP. Please indicate 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice. I will comprise a final conference list from this. I have found that this is the best way to accommodate everyone's schedules and most will end up with their first or second choices. It will be first com first serve, so returning it in the agenda as fast as possible is a good idea. These will also be early release days, however those times have not been given to me yet. Historically Monday and Tuesday have been 12:25 release and Wednesday has been an 11:10 release. I feel like this will be a safe bet that these will be the same this year, but I will keep you up to date when I know for sure. I look forward to conferencing with everyone!

Ancient Mesopotamia Taste Testing: Thank you for everyone who signed up for food for our taste testing on Friday. This was such a fun activity. After we wrote the name of our food we tasted it. Then we circled thumbs up or down depending on if we liked the taste of it or not. Then in the middle we wrote an adjective for the way our food tasted. It was so much fun watching them try things like goat cheese and dates and figs. It was also surprising who liked what. I was also impressed with how everyone tried everything, I did not have a single protester this year! Here are some pictures from Friday.

Sorry for the Tuesday post, I too have been under the weather! Sunday was rough and Monday I came home and went to bed. I hope we all get well and stay well! -Ms. Shaw

Picture Day 2019

Happy September families. We survived a full week back after our weird two day cyber week, and we survived Friday the 13th with a full moon!  We have one more new routine to add this week, RTI. Please read on to learn more about that below, as well as what is happening in our class this week.

Math:  This week we will finish working on our strategies for counting on. After this we will move onto understanding the equal sign and constructing true number sentences (ex: 2+3 = 4+1). More challenging, students will identify false number sentences and learn how to fix them by changing an addend. 

ELA:  We are moving into unit 2 from our NatGeo series, which means that the theme of our NatGeo series will be plants for the next 4 weeks. We will be tying these stories into our science the next several weeks as well. In grammar we will be looking at present progressive verb tense (ing with am, is, and are).

Social Studies:  We will be wrapping up Ancient Mesopotamia this week. We will have an Ancient Mesopotamia taste testing to try some of the foods from the region. We will need the following food donations to make this happen. If you can bring in any of the following supplies by this Friday (September 20th) we would greatly appreciate your contributions:

• Apples (sliced)
• Honeydew (sliced)
• Cantaloupe (sliced)
• Pita Bread
• Figs
• Dates
• Goat Cheese
• Grapes

Science:  Now that we have learned all about what it means to be a scientist we will begin our science units. As mentioned above, our first unit will be plants to coincide with our ELA unit. We will begin by planting alfalfa and ryegrass seeds and focus on the question, "What happens to seeds in moist soil."  This also begins our learning of the scientific process, which we will follow and record in our notebooks every time we conduct an experiment.

Picture Day:  Picture Day is this Wednesday. If you are ordering pictures please make sure you have your packets returned to me by Wednesday morning at the latest. You may also order pictures online at mylifetouch.com using your ID SR259110Q0. If you order pictures online, make sure you let me know via a note in the agenda. We are scheduled to take our pictures at 10:15 Wednesday morning, so please be on time.

RTI:  RTI begins this week. RTI is our whole school reading intervention. First grade goes to RTI after lunch. We break into small groups based on individual reading needs of our students.  Then during these 25 minutes we work on meeting those needs/skills in smaller and more intensive group settings. 

Mustang Gallop:  The Marshall Gallop is our annual jog-a-thon fundraiser where 100% of the proceeds comes back to Marshall school in the way of school supplies for students and other classroom items needed by teachers at the beginning of the year.  Your child should have gone home with a packet on Friday. This is so that they may begin collecting pledges from family and friends. Pledges can be made per lap or as a flat rate. We will run our Jog-a-thon on Friday, September 27th. First grade running time is at 9:30. This day is to determine how many laps your child has run so they can go back and collect from those who choose to donate per lap. Money envelopes are due back on October 4th. Check are accepted, made payable to Marshall PTO. We would love to have 100% of the students participate in this event! This is our 12th annual Gallop and our theme is Lunar Launch. I think the class has agreed that we will be Shaw's Shooting Stars. If you would like to come join us for the Gallop, we would love to see you here!

Snacks Needed:  We are out of snacks! If you could provide us with one or two healthy snacks to carry us through for a while we would greatly appreciate it. Our first graders get very hungry between breakfast and lunch and a snack is needed to help fuel their brains and bodies until they can make it to lunch. 

The students are noticeably becoming more familiar with routines and expectations, and I see it in their behaviors and attentiveness during class and instructional time. We are growing, and I am proud of the gains we are making! - Ms. Shaw

Updates September 9th-13th

Happy September, and welcome back! Thank you for being patient while FUSD worked diligently on restoring all systems back to where they needed to be to ensure the safety of all students and staff, and preforming the proper maintenance needed on all computer systems to get us back to running on business as usual. The FUSD Tech team, and everyone else who spent countless hours to make sure we could be open on Monday did an amazing job, and I for one am extremely grateful for the work they put in and the response of the district! The 2 cyber snow days put us slightly behind, so next week will be spent doing some catch up, then we will be back on track. Here's how next week will look academically...

Math:  We will wrap up our unit on addition word problems, which will conclude with a unit test about mid week. After this we will  begin counting on to solve addition problems.  

ELA:  Due to our 2 day week last week we will continue with our short o spelling words. This means I will send home the same list of words so that the children may continue practicing their short o list, and the test will be given on Friday. We had a few weeks of cushion built into our yearly schedule for spelling, so this will be just fine. Also, we did not have an opportunity to read "The Dot" so we will do that this week. We did have the opportunity to start our grammar lessons with Ms. Perkins however. We have started learning about nouns and verbs. I will continue to reinforce these two concepts with additional lessons this week. Ms. Perkins will also be teaching about pronouns, adjectives, and prepositions. Then we will be learning how to put all our parts of speech together to form sentences.  We are also continuing our handwriting lessons, currently focusing on correctly writing numbers 0-20.

Social Studies:  We will be hitting all our Ancient Mesopotamia concepts we did not get to last week. Ziggurats, cuneiform writing, and inventions/contributions of the Ancient Mesopotamians. Next week we will be concluding our unit of study with a taste test of foods from Ancient Mesopotamian times. Please be on the look out in next weeks blog for food we will need donated for this special lesson. 

Science:  Before we begin our science units I like to introduce the students to science by reading the book, "What Is a Scientist?"  This gives them an ideas of what a scientist does, and what they will be doing as scientists in our classroom. Then we will cut and paste scientists into our notebooks and write adjectives to describe a scientist. This activity also gives us an opportunity to become familiar with our science notebooks and start hearing terms such as predict and hypothesis and data.  

Marshall Gallop:  This Friday our students will be attending the Pep Rally for our Marshall Mustang Gallop. The Gallop is our amazing annual PTO fundraiser. Your students should be bringing home pledge packets on Friday, I believe. These are to collect pledges from friends and family members who would like to donate to our school fundraiser. Pledges may take form in an amount per lap (for instance, someone may want to pledge $1 per every lap your child runs on Gallop day) or they may be a flat donation in any amount. The actual Gallop (the day the kiddos run their laps) will be on Friday, September 27th. We will be sending home volunteer forms for this day as well. This is just the basic information I have thus far, more information will be coming. Please remember, this is the only fundraiser for Marshall for the entire year. We highly encourage as much participation as we can get, seeing as 100% of these funds always go directly back to our students. Last year the money raised went into buying all the back to school supplies for every students and teacher here at Marshall. This is very unprecedented in our field of work, and I know I for one was extremely grateful not to have to buy supplies out of my pocket for the beginning of the year. This was the first year I did not have to do this, and it would not have been possible if not for this fundraiser and the generosity of our amazing PTO! I know they plan to continue this contribution to our families, so let's all do our share in making this happen and go out there and collect those donations! Thank you for your participation!

Picture Day:  Marshall picture day is next Wednesday, September 18th.  Picture packets should be going home soon!

I really look forward to seeing the kids Monday morning, and having a full week of school to do some learning! Let's do this! -Ms. Shaw 

Labor Day

Happy Labor Day! Hope everyone is relaxing and preparing for our short week ahead. Four days, still packing it all in. Here's what we have happening for our week ahead:

Math:  We will be finishing up addition word problems. The students will be learning how to solve problems with missing addends (ex: 5 + ____ =  8). We will continue to work on writing all answers in number bonds and number sentences. We are also learning how to solve problems with math drawings (simple shapes to represent our objects in our stories) and to make sure our drawings show the parts we know in our stories clearly. 

ELA:  We will be working on the short o sound this week, which will give us the chance to read the fiction story, "The Dot." We will incorporate a fun Dot art project with this story as well. We will also learn to how to do Work on Writing during Daily 5 (which we did not get to do last week). This week we will also begin our daily grammar lessons with Mrs. Perkins. She will be coming into our classroom everyday Monday-Thursday and be doing a 30 minute grammar lesson with the whole class. These lessons are designed to help us improve reading, reading comprehension, and writing skills. 

Social Studies:  We are still studying Ancient Mesopotamia. The students enjoyed our mapping activity where they colored the two rivers that surround Ancient Mesopotamia (The Tigris and The Euphrates) and colored in the land that was Ancient Mesopotamia (which means "land between two rivers"). This week we will learn more about the clothing of the Mesopotamians, and their Ziggurats. If time allows we will also learn about their writing and try our hand at writing our name in Cuneiform.

Volunteering at School:  The first PTO meeting of the year is this Wednesday in the library at 4:30. The PTO is a fun and easy way to get involved in your child's schooling here at Marshall. The meetings are held the first Wednesday of every month from 4:30-5:30 and free child care is always available. I know this is a great way for you to hear first hand what is happening here at school and that you can help in what you can, no pressure to do more than that! If you would like to see what our amazing PTO is all about make plans to stop in Wednesday for their first meeting, they would love to see you there! 

If you are more interested in volunteering in the classroom that would be great as well. I am in search of someone to help grade rocket math (20 minutes daily). If you would like to come in and help in some other capacity, reach out and we can make it happen! Thank you!

Suzuki Violin:  Suzuki Violin starts back up this week. This is our amazing partnership with NAU where all Marshall students, K-2 receive free Suzuki violin lessons twice a week here at school. This is such an amazing, one of a kind program and we are so excited to be offering it to our students once again!

I hope everyone is rested and ready for our week ahead!       -Ms. Shaw