Weekly Update

Hello Families,

Welcome to March! Thank you for taking the time to attend your child’s conference. I enjoyed talking with you about your child’s progress in 1^st grade! JWe have survived two more weeks of unexpected snow days, late starts, and early releases. I hope this all is behind us, but I have a feeling we haven’t seen the end of it yet. In addition to the change in school schedule we’ve had a fun couple of weeks celebrating Winter Fest.  I hope your child enjoyed this fun celebration.

Math

We finished our unit on Counting and Number Patterns today. Your child should be skip counting by 2, 5, and 10 and identifying even and odd numbers up to 100. We also learned about ordinal positions (1^st, 2^nd, 3^rd…) and making numbers 11 to 20. Reviewing that any number 10 – 20 is 10 and some ones is great practice. Your child should be able to say that 16 is 10 and 6 etc.

Reading Workshop

We finished our questioning unit today. The last couple of weeks we’ve been asking questions about biographies. The students were particularly interested in the Ruby Bridges story. Please continue the conversation at home as you read the article about her in one of the Scholastic News articles that was sent home today. We will practice visualizing when we return from spring break. Please continue to encourage your child to ask good questions using our good question words: who, what, where, when, why, and how.

Writer’s Workshop

We are working on an independent personal narrative. Each child will need to write three chronological events and a conclusion sentence about something they will always remember. These will be shared at conferences. First grade writing expectations at this time of the year are:

Proper spacing between letters, words, and sentences

Capital letters at the beginning of sentences

Capitals letters for proper nouns

End marks

Sight words spelled correctly

One syllable short vowel words spelled correctly

Words with beginning and/or ending blends and short vowels spelled correctly

Open vowel words spelled correctly

CVCe words spelled correctly.

These skills are done in isolation beautifully! J Now we need to get it to transfer over to their writing.

 

This Week I Really Learned!

Thank you for writing to your child each week. We were not able to write out letters this week with all of the Valentine’s festivities. Feel free to have your child write a letter to you at home and/or write to your child anyway. J

Word Workshop

We have learned several new diagraphs that past couple of weeks. Your child should be reading and spelling words with th, sh, ch, and wh digraphs. We know that wh and th each make 2 sounds. A strategy is to try both sounds when decoding an unknown word and see if it makes sense.

Grammar

We practiced using the present and past tense of see and say correctly.   

***The Scholastic News articles are being sent home for extra reading material over spring break. They are not required to be read, but most students enjoy the articles and most can read them independently.***

Have a wonderful spring break and I’m looking forward to seeing everyone in a week!