Some Scholastic Book Club catalogues went home this week. If you are interested in ordering books through Scholastic, please do so online. You can start at this website, on the Scholastic page, where you will need to register before ordering. I will send home catalogues periodically, and any books ordered will be delivered to school and sent home with your child. Give me a heads-up if you intend for the books to be a surprise!
Every morning we do exercises while we practice counting by 1s, 2s, 5s, and 10s! This week in math, we worked on "counting on" to add. Students often count up both numbers that they are adding together, so we are trying to develop efficiency by starting at the bigger number and counting up from there.
For example, for 5 + 3, students start by saying 5, then count up 3 more... 6, 7, 8! 5 + 3 = 8!
We started the first Unit in our Wonders literacy program this week! Your student can access all of the current Wonders stories, skills, and activities in his or her ConnectEd account. Each week we will have an essential question. For this week, our essential question is: What do you do at your school? Each week we will learn new sight words (or High Frequency Words) too. This week's sight words are: does, not, school, what. We will also have a certain spelling pattern that we work on each week. For this week, we're focusing on short a words: man, can, nap, tap, cat, and hat. Practicing these words will be helpful, but we will not have traditional spelling tests. I will assess students' spelling progress through the spelling activities we do in class and on Seesaw and through each student's writing. If you'd like to develop a routine where you take tests at home though, please feel free! 😉
This week, we wrote about what we do at school, and we created a class book called At School, which will be posted on Seesaw. Enjoy!
I really appreciate all of the hard work you are all doing at home. There was a question about expectations for the students' writing in their new Weekly Writing Journals. I am hoping for students to respond to at least two of the writing prompts per week. Students should use complete sentences. Please encourage your child to try his best by writing all of the sounds he hears in a word. The spelling will not likely be perfect, but at this stage we are simply encouraging first graders to use their best "sound spelling." Your child may still need some coaching with this, and that's ok. If he has made an attempt but the word is hard to decipher, feel free to write the dictionary spelling for the word underneath so that Mrs. Bono and I can decode your child's writing properly. Thank you!
Last, but definitely not least, students did a cool project this week - Nature Weaving! They used items from nature (plus a few ribbons to jazz things up) to weave through a cardboard loom. It was a fun and relaxing project, and the students were so proud of their beautiful creations!
Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns or information to share!
Have a wonderful weekend!
~Jess