In your child's folder, you will find a writing piece with an attached rubric. I wanted to make sure that families knew what this was. We have just begun a new writing unit about Nonfiction Informational Texts during our writing workshop. To begin every writing unit we first immerse ourselves in the genre (in this case, nonfiction informational texts) to remind ourselves of the text features and to brainstorm a list of similarities we see among the professionally published books. We then write an "on demand" piece of writing from that genre. Students were given 45 minutes to completely write a piece of nonfiction informational text based on what they were recently immersed in, but no instruction about the genre.
These "On Demand" pieces were then scored with the "Yes/No Rubric" students will be using at the end of the unit to score themselves before we have one-on-one writing conferences about their published pieces. Students were scored on a 1-4 scale based on how many Yes's and how many No's they received. Today the class and I went through the rubric. They all did exceptionally well in the areas that are First Grade standards. Certain parts of the rubric (for example, writing an introduction) are second-grade standards based, and so have not been taught to the students yet. The students all understand that receiving a 3 or a 4 before a unit is taught would be quite rare, since being on or above grade level before a unit is taught is not expected at all.
I wanted you to be aware of this since all students' scores were where they were expected to be - at level 1 or 2 - on this "On Demand" task, yet it can be surprising to a parent who is unaware of the context of the assignment. A copy of this task is kept in their writing file and will be used to compare their published piece at the end of the writing unit to how they were writing before the unit began. This is so students can see personal growth in terms of themselves as writers.
If you have any questions about this, please don't hesitate to ask.
As my email said, we first immersed ourselves in the genre and took notes on what we noticed. Then we did the "on demand" piece. After that, we began to work on a class book all about the parks in NYC. As we begin studying New York City, both past and present, our students will choose one place or feature of NYC to write their own information book about. Parks are a great part of our city, and they are something the kids have a lot of first-hand knowledge about. 
To start our book, students were asked to list the 4 chapters they thought our book should have. These ideas were then recorded on pink post-it notes. Today we spread all of the post-it notes out on the board. When ones were exactly alike, we put them on top of one another. Some chapters were really popular (such as trees and squirrels) while other post-it notes stood alone (like swimming pools and jump ropes). We then started to sort our post-it notes. We had a limitation though - we had to eventually get everything sorted into only 4 chapters. Sorting those 80 post-it notes took quite a long time!
After 30 minutes of intense discussion, we have our tentative chapter categories: Nature, Workers/People in Parks, History of Parks, and Playing at the Park. We wrote those on yellow post-it notes. We still want to consider using the History of Parks chapter as merely "fun facts" or "fact boxes" throughout the book and then splitting either the Nature chapter into two separate chapters (Plants and Animals) or splitting the Workers/People in Parks chapter into two chapters (People Who Work at the Park and People Who Play at the Park).
We will soon begin researching these categories by using books, the internet, interviews, and observations. Then we will choose a chapter to draft and begin splitting each chapter into Headings and Subheadings within our chapter-writing groups. We plan to have a published book in the next few weeks to share with our friends, families, and reading buddies!
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Today we also used a new math material for the first time: Math Pockets! We will be using them on a near-daily basis. Our math pockets are blue on one side and white on the other. Between those two sides is a dry-erase marker, a piece of felt, and any needed math manipulatives for our current unit. First, we used our Math Pockets to answer questions on the rug. Once we had our answer written down on the white side, we flipped over to the blue. It was so easy to see a sea of blue and know everyone was ready to talk. Then we shared our answers. After that, we worked in partners to find the missing number of dots on our Tens Frames and write at least one equation that showed how we found the missing number. It was a lot of fun!