First Grade News

Week of 8/30 – 9/3/2010

“You can teach a student a lesson for a day; but if you can teach him to learn by creating curiosity, he will continue the learning process as long as he lives.”  ~Clay P. Bedford

 Things to look forward to:

**With the heat, students are permitted to bring water bottles to school until given notice that they aren’t allowed to have them in the room anymore. Due to condensation, I ask that the water bottles sent have a sock over them to keep the water from leaking on desks. I also ask that they are water bottles that don’t require the lid to be screwed off as sometimes they can be knocked over and cause a big mess in the classroom. Thanks for your help!

**Don’t forget to work on your Magazine sales to collect your ducks for prizes! It’s a great way to earn money for the school.

*September 6, 2010- No School Labor day

*September 8, 2010- Meet the teacher(s) night!!! I look forward to meeting you and sharing our activities/goals to look forward to for the year!

*September 10, 2010- Grandparent’s Day! Please be sure to return number of grandparents attending. We will be having donuts and juice in the gym after a special presentation for them. We hope they are able to attend. J

*September 25, 2010- SJCS Golf Outing J

*Birthdays: 9/1- Mrs. Brossart, 9/8- Juliet Canaan, Alexis Bynum 9/26

*October 8^th: Field trip to Wendell Farm. Information will come home as the date gets closer!

*October 16^th- SJCS Drawdown Remember to purchase your tickets for one of our biggest fundraisers! Hope to see you there!

Our learning activities for the week:

 Reading:  This week we are reviewing the kindergarten skills. We are spending our reading time reviewing each letter and sound and building short consonant-vowel-consonant words. Each day we took a few letters of the alphabet to concentrate on and practiced our beginning sounds in our words. We are still listening to story read alouds right now and reviewing the beginning, middle, and end of the stories we read. We each began our own word wall ring to keep our words that we review from kindergarten and that we will be introduced to during first grade. Our word wall words this week (kindergarten review) were: I, see, my, like, a, and to. As we are working on review, many of the students have been called out of the room to complete testing over dolch words, and beginning literacy strategies so that we can get a feel for where each student is with their level of reading to make sure that we are challenging them in the classroom. Final reading placement should be determined by the end of this week!

Phonics:  We are beginning the year with a review of all the letters and sounds. Every afternoon we complete our letter chants to help us remember sounds and then we are completing our Letter sheets that you will find in your child’s packet this week. You will see our concentration has been on short a words. We are identifying the sound for –an, -at, -ad words to help us when sounding out words. Each child colors a consonant according to the sound I make and then practices writing the uppercase or lowercase letter below it. Then they write a short a word on the 3 lines based off of a word I say out loud and ask them to spell. You will see they are learning how to check their own papers, but I always collect them and look over them as well. As a challenge, on the back of some of their papers, you will find they are sorting the words I am asking them to read (sound out) at the bottoms of their paper and also add new words with similar endings.

 Math:  We are beginning the year with our numbers. We are practicing using linking cubes to help us identify a number and find out what numbers are bigger or smaller. This week we are working with writing the numbers 1, 4, and 5 correctly.

 English:  This week, we begin with identifying a sentence. We have chant to help us remember  that “Every sentence in the whole wide world begins with a capital letter and ends with a punctuation mark.” As we progress throughout the year, we will be looking at how we use these punctuation marks and what kind of sentences we use in our writing. Students also began their first writing pieces this week. Our first skill with Writer’s workshop is that our writing can come from a picture. Each child picked an event that they remember most, and began drawing a picture and wrote at least one sentence to tell what is in their picture. We are going to continue working with this piece and adding detail to make it better.

 Religion:  This week we are learning how we belong to a church family. Each of us took the time to draw one way that we show we are following the Good Shepherd in our lives at school or at home. We also trace our feet to help remind us the good things we do in life will help us be followers of Jesus. We will end this chapter on our church Family and the Good Shepherd as our leader on Friday.

 Science:  This week we began our lesson with living and non-living things. We’ve learned a song to help us remember the important needs of a living thing so that we can identify what makes a living or non-living thing. We also went outside and explored what we see and hear around us that would be classified as living and non-living.

Social Studies: We begin our year with a discussion about community and rules. Students have already compiled their list of classroom rules but we compared and contrasted how these rules apply to our community and how/why some are different. 

 Please remember if you have any questions or concerns you can email me, call or send a note. sgraf@sjcshamilton.org

Thanks,

 Sarah Graf

Suggested Chapter books for first graders:

*A to Z Mysteries series by Ron Roy

*Junie B. Jones by Barbara Park

*Magic Tree House series by Mary Pope Osborne

*Piper Reed series by Kimberly Willis Holt

*Ready Freddy series by Abby Klein

*Young Cam Jansen mystery series by David Adler

*“Detective Mole” series and “Henry” series by Robert Quackenbush

*Frog and Toad are Friends by Arnold Lobel

*Piggy's Pancake Parlor by David McPhail

*Big Brown Bear's up and Down Day by David McPhail

*Minnie and Moo Series by Denys Cazet

*Henry and Mudge series by Cynthia Rylant