February is Here!

Reading

We are still working hard on our reading skills. Some kids do a great job with fluency but they read so fast that they forget to think about what they are reading! Other kids struggle to recognize the words and the comprehension gets left behind. Truly, fluency and comprehension go hand in hand.

Fluency improves by quickly and correctly recognizing words. This comes from practice, practice, and more practice! Study the sight words and reread books over and over again. Repetition is great for fluency and also builds expression as the text becomes more predictable.

Math

We are tackling the (near) impossible in math....time! Our standard says that the kids need to be able to tell time to the hour and half hour and recognize the difference between digital and analog clocks. So far so good but we have a long way to go. Quiz your kids to try to at least give you the hour if you see an analog clock. Digital clocks are easy but everyone needs a challenge!

Science

We have just begun the second part of our living and nonliving things unit...Animals! There is so much to learn about animals. We are going to focus on the things animals need to survive and comparing the basic needs, movements, appearance, and more of the animals. How fun it is to learn about the special features of animals!

Social Studies

We are continuing to work on our American Heroes unit. We have learned about Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Lewis and Clark, Sacagawea, and we are finishing up Teddy Roosevelt. Our next hero will be Harriet Tubman. It is hard to imagine the life she lived!

Happy New Year!

Welcome Back to School!

We are halfway through the year and making progress on learning all of the first grade Common Core Standards!

Last Friday, 1/11/13, the kids took the STAR Reading test. Overall the class did quite well and made huge gains in their reading levels. Your child now has AR Reading Folders where they will record all of the AR tests that they take along with the score. Your child's reading level and 9 weeks goal is recorded in the folder as well. Please encourage your child to read and take AR tests. I have tried to stress to the kids that it is more important to read carefully than to read quickly just so they can take a test. These scores count!! In order to attend the AR party at the end of the 9 weeks, each child must have met the point goal assigned to them by reading books on their reading level and achieving an overall average score of 85% or higher.

Reading
We are continuing to work on Reading Comprehension. We have just begun reading the book Lulu and the Brontosaurus. We will be working on picking out the important details and then writing summaries in our Reading journals on each chapter.

I am also still testing kids weekly on their Reading fluency. This is a short 1 minute test where the kids read a passage as quickly and accurately as they can. I record the correct words per minute which we then track on a weekly basis. If a child scores less than 20 words per minute, I will retest them on Friday. If the reading passage comes home attached to your child's behavior sheet, it means that your child scored less than the required 20 words per minute so please practice it with them nightly. It really does make a big difference!

Math
In math, we are finishing up our fraction unit. Next week, we will be starting our next unit which is on measurement.

Science
The current unit in science focuses on plants and animals. We will be looking at the different parts of each and what each need to be able to live.

Social Studies
In Social Studies, we are still learning about American Heroes. Last week, we spent some time talking about Sacagawea. This week, we take a look at Lewis and Clark and their journey out west with Sacagawea. And since Martin Luther King day is next week, we will definitely spend some time learning about his contributions to the civil rights movement and the freedoms that ALL Americans enjoy today.

What's New?

Take a look on the right side of the page....I have added a page to the blog that lists our weekly spelling and sight words. Click on the link, find the story we are working on for the week, and then click on whichever you need...the spelling words or the sight words.

We have recently begun doing weekly fluency assessments in Reading. Each Monday, your child does a "cold read" of a grade level passage that he/she has never seen before. They have 1 minute to read as much as they can in the passage. Students will bring home a copy of the passage on Monday and should practice it throughout the week. If they are unable to meet a minimum of 20 words per minute on Monday's assessment, they will be retested on Friday. Please read these passages with your children nightly. It only takes a moment and is so valuable to their fluency skills.

In Music class, the students have been practicing for the Christmas program. Informational letters from Mrs. Poppell will be going home on Monday to let you know your child's role in the program and the attire he/she will need. If you have any further questions, please contact Mrs. Poppell. 

Next week is children's book week. Here is the schedule for the week:

Monday - No School
Tuesday - Crazy Sock Day
Wednesday - Hat Day
Thursday - Camouflage Day
Friday - *Book Character Parade

*Students can dress up like their favorite book character. Students will need to carry the book with them during the parade through the school. Books must be chosen before Friday.

In Reading, we are almost finished reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The kids have really enjoyed this story. Roald Dahl certainly has quite an imagination. I hope the kids will be able to understand from reading this book that their only limitations are their own imaginations!

We are wrapping up Unit 2 in Math and will be moving into Unit 3, Geometry. Personally, I don't remember learning Geometry until 10th grade but these days we are starting early. Your children will be learning some new and interesting concepts in math. This is actually a fun unit and the kids usually tend to do well with it.

In Science, we are finishing up magnets and will then be moving on to sound. The kids have had a blast playing with magnets and learning that magnets not only attract but also repel. Ask your child why this happens...he/she should be able to answer your question! :)

In Social Studies, we have learned about many tall tales such as John Henry, Annie Oakley, Davy Crockett, and Paul Bunyan. We will be moving on to famous American heroes.

It is hard to believe that it is September already! I have already seen a big difference in the students' ability to look at situations and thing critically. Here are some updates for this week!

 

Reading

 

We are still working on our anchor story, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. What I mean by anchor is that it serves as the basis for everything we do spanning from Reading to Language Arts to Science, and Social Studies. We are about half way through the book. Right now, Dorothy and her friends have reached The Emerald City. Now we are about to see if the Great Oz will be able to help with each character's special request.

 

Speaking of characters, did you know that that is only one piece of what is called the narrative elements in a story? Ask your child what the other two are. He or she should know! (The other two are setting, and plot!) We have used our story to analyze each of these elements in the story. We have found that there are more than one character in our story and there are quite a few settings. Just last week the students illustrated the setting of their choice and wrote two sentences about the setting.

 

The spelling words for this week are:

hot  hop  dot   pick   now  want  pop  pot  not  back

 

Sight words:

don't   of   so

 

 

 

Language Arts and Writing

 

 

What we are learning in Writing and Language Arts goes hand in hand. We are learning about sentences. At this age, kids know the word sentence but they don't know what one is! We have started learning about the different parts of a sentence so that they can apply those skills to writing. Did you know what a sentence is? First, it is a group of words that expresses a complete thought. Second, it begins with a capital letter. Third, it ends with punctuation. Fourth, sentence must have both a naming and telling part. Last, they must make sense! This is a lot to remember, I know, but we are using our fingers to help us: one finger for each part of a sentence that we need to remember! Naturally, with what we are learning about sentences, we are practicing those skills by writing in sentences and checking to make sure we are including each of the parts mentioned above.

 

 

Math

 



We have pretty much finished up with tally marks, although we will keep hitting them here and there to keep them fresh and to review them. Now we are moving on to an extremely important concept....probably the most important one your child will learn in first grade and certainly the basis for all of math through the rest of his or her schooling...PLACE VALUE! We are just starting to understand that there is a tens place and a ones place in numbers. Right now, the kids can tell me that the digit 2 followed by a 0 represents the number 20 but if I take the two digits and switch them around so that it looks like this: 02, they get a little confused as to why these do not represent the same number. We are working on understanding that the 2 in the tens place does not actually mean just 2 but rather 2 tens which is the same as 20 ones! We are learning this concept by using base 10 blocks. Our next step will be for kids to make their own meaning of this concept by taking a group of digits and being able to move them around to make different number combinations. For example, when given the digits 7 and 2, students will be able to make the two numbers 27 and 72 and then tell which is larger and why. They will also be able to represent these numbers using drawings, manipulatives, number sentences, and any other way they can think of.

 

 

Science

 

We are still working on weather and this week will be learning about the different instruments we use to measure and analyze weather. We will be looking at windvanes, thermometers, and anemometers. We have already looked at clouds and learned that there are many different kinds. Some bring good weather and some bring rain while others bring really severe weather like thunderstorms. We even did an experiment in class to see if we could make our own clouds! (We did!)

 

 

Social Studies

 

In Social Studies, the kids have learned that landforms are the different shapes of land on our Earth. The kids can tell you the difference between lakes, rivers, mountains, hills, oceans, and marshes. (just to name a few!) We have moved on and are now learning about the 7 continents. We have even learned a new song to help us remember them! Ask your child if he or she can sing it to you! 



Welcome Back!

Our first week is off to a great start. We spent a lot of time learning about routines and procedures…not always fun but a necessary evil! Check in with our blog weekly to see what is going on in the classroom. Spelling and sight words will be posted and updated on the blog also so please feel free to check for those as well.

New Standards

The State of Georgia has implemented a new set of academic standards this year called common core. The purpose of this is to better prepare our kids to be college and career ready. If that wasn’t good news, then this will be….these standards are now uniform across 48 out of the 50 states. This means that if you leave Georgia mid year and move to another state, chances are, your child will be able to pick right up where he/she left off in Georgia. This will eliminate the gaps that kids sometimes experience when they transfer into a new school and the new school is teaching different content. The students will be expected to work hard to master these new standards but the teachers will be right there beside them every step of the way.

Reading and Language Arts

Our first unit in Reading is all about Mapping Our Worlds: Dreams and Reality. We have already begun this unit by reading The Wonderful Wizard of OZ, which will serve as an “anchor” book for most of the activities in this unit. This unit is going to encourage students to really start looking deeply into literature to discover what treasures the students can find deeper in the text. In other words, we will be looking critically at characters to determine their feelings in a story and how that affects their actions. For this week, we are starting easy with key details. These are the big events and ideas in the book and should be easy for your child to pick out. From there, I will model thinking processes that will help your child make better connections within the book which they can then apply to other books and even real life situations! Watch out because by the end of first grade, your child is going to be a thinker!

Math

In math, we are starting off with concepts of numbers. Just like with the reading, we want kids to fully understand the concepts behind things. Rote memorization is a thing of the past! Today, it is important for kids to have a solid foundation so that they can transfer their knowledge to everyday life and apply it to a variety of situations! Specifically this week, we will be working on counting number up to 120 and will be learning about the words “more than” and “less than”. Easy enough for you and me but we have been doing this for a while! We want the kids to not only be able to just simply count to 120; we want them to understand why we have numbers and how we use them. We want them to be able to explain how they know that a set is more than, less than, or equal to. They will also need to be able to show numbers in different ways. For example, we know that 2 + 2 = 4, right? Well so does 1 + 3 and 5 – 1!  They will also learn how to explain their thinking verbally, in written form, and with pictures. I told you your child would be a thinker by the end of 1^st grade!

Science and Social Studies

Science and Social Studies will play into our reading unit also. Like I said, our anchor book will be The Wizard of Oz. For Science, weather goes quite nicely with our story, don’t you think? After all, it was a tornado that sparked the events that occurred in the book! And Social Studies? This is an easy one too. The story begins in Kansas….flat, grassy praries. From there, the story has a number of different settings that we will explore. So what is the connection there? Landforms! Very convenient, right? J

Stay tuned for next week!