Hello,
January is flying by! New Directions week was a great success, even with our unexpected day off of school. It was great to see so many kids get into the school spirit. Progress reports are being finished up this week, and will go home with students on Monday. It’s amazing how much first graders have grown so far this year!
Upcoming Events:
February 3: Joint NDLC/Quinney Dance 6:00-7:30
February 6: PSC Meeting
February 7: Early Release
February 9-10: Math Staff Developer here!
February 14: Valentine’s Day
February 23: Early Release
February 24: No School for Students
February 27: Family Night: Music, MasterPieces and Munchies
Reading: We continue to work on being in charge of our own reading. Last week we added the strategies of reading words part by part and using words we know to solve words we don’t know (our word wall words come in handy for this)! This week we will be trying sounds many ways to figure out words (we are learning vowels can make LOTS of different sounds), using our sight words (which are also our word wall words) to read fluently, setting new goals using the new strategies we’ve been learning, and working hard to understand our books, which might include rereading at times. We are really focusing on having readers take charge of their own reading and trying more than one strategy to help them figure out tricky words!
Writing: Students did a great job decorating their writing folder! The have so many ideas of things they can review. We talked about how some things review writers can review are things (movies, books, games), and places (restaurants, stores, vacation places, cities). Help your child be on the look out for things he or she can review! We are learning how review writers can hook readers with questions and then tell their opinion. Review writers give reasons for their opinions and examples to really try to convince their reader. We are learning that review writers can compare their topic to something else to make their opinion stronger and then can add a small moment story about a time with their topic. We have some very convincing first grade writers!
Word Work: The new words this week are: with, come, how, not, out. Please have your child practice these words on a regular basis. As they become fluent with them, it’s helps them with their reading and writing.
Math: We just completed a couple of mid year assessments to determine the skills first graders have mastered and areas we still need to focus on. We have just started our next math unit, Place Value Situations. In this unit we will be working on solving problems with teen numbers and finding patterns and relationships with numbers up to 120. This week we will be solving teen addition problems with unknown partners (14 children are playing games. 9 of them are girls. How many of them are boys?), solve teen subtraction problems (13 giraffes march in a parade. 7 of them go home. How many are left?) and solve and write addition and subtraction problems to find teen totals and unknown partners. See the parent note and blue and purple quilt cards that are coming home today for more information about the Make-a-Ten strategy we are practicing in this unit to solve addition and subtraction equations with teen numbers.
Content: We have just started our solids and liquids unit. What another exciting hands on science unit for students! In this unit students will learn about the properties of solids and liquids. This week we will be learning that solids can be described by their properties such as color, shape, ability to roll or stack, hardness, magnetic attraction and whether they float or sink. We’ll be performing tests to investigate these different properties. In a couple of weeks we will begin to investigate liquids. This fits nicely with our next writing unit, Writing Like Scientists, in which we conduct and write about our own experiments!
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