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!
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