9/14-9/18

It was another great week at school! We started off Monday with Miss Brawley taking over as our teacher. She did an excellent job, and we are going to miss her so much when she leaves us in two weeks. L It was an extra fun morning for Miss Brawley, because Andrew’s new puppy, Tomahawk, visited the classroom for show and share. If your family pet would like to visit the classroom the day that your child has show and share, please let me know ahead of time, just like Andrew’s mommy did! The kids loved Tomahawk! Here they are petting him.

A lot of new learning took place, as always!

In phonics, we worked on adding suffixes s and ing to words. If your child has difficulty reading a word that has a suffix, try covering up the suffix, and having your child to read the base word. Then let him/her add the suffix. This helps tremendously. We also counted syllables (or word parts). We count syllables by holding our hand slightly under our chin and saying a word. Each time our chin drops to hit our hand, that is a syllable. Syllabication is very important, as it helps us to spell long words by breaking them into chunks. Call out a few words so that your child can count the number of syllables (s)he hears.

The class visited a new website: Spelling City, and had a blast with the games. We also played Secret Squares this week, which is a spelling review game similar to Battleship.

We read A Fox and a Kit from our Reading Street book, and we discussed the main idea of a story. When you read a book with your child, ask him/her what the story is mostly about. We also read LOTS of books in small groups. The progress your children are making in their oral reading is outstanding! I could not do what I do with them without your help, so please keep up the reading at home! It really pays off! The class also took a lot of AR quizzes! I have a few students who are already obsessed with AR! J

In grammar, we worked on word order in sentences and completing cloze (fill in the blank) sentences. At the vocabulary center, students had to solve jumbled sentences. I wrote about seven sentences (using story words), each on a different sentence strip, and then cut them apart and put them into their own numbered Ziploc bags. Students took turns reading their cards, and making a sentence with the cards. They loved it!

In math we honed our addition skills, learning about the order property. The order property tells us that 5+4 and 4+5 both equal 9. Addends can come in any order. At math stations, students got to play addition BINGO. This coming week we will introduce subtraction number sentences. We have already been developing the concept through story problems, but we will introduce the symbol now. When you’re driving down the road, try asking your child to solve a story problem, such as if there are four red cars and three green cars, how many are there in all. You’ll be amazed!

We talked about farm life during our unit of study. The students were read a few farm themed books. They talked about the many jobs of farmers, and they learned about habitats. They even got to watch some online videos of animals in their natural habitats. We will continue our farmlife study next week.

This past Friday meteorologist Spencer Denton visited our first grade to talk about weather. We will begin our unit of study about weather in two weeks, so Mr. Denton’s speech got the class ready for our weather unit! This coming Friday will bring another visitor: Johnny Appleseed! We will also be having our apple tasting Friday afternoon. Please remember to send in the items you volunteered to send.

Thank you for everything!!! I have enjoyed getting to know you better during our conferences!