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
1st 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!
