Friday, January 30

This morning we started our day off with a kick-off to I Love to Read Month. We are setting sail to Reading Paradise this year! In your child's folder, you will find a few activities for them to work on at home. Please send in a reading slip for each 15 minutes your child reads at home. There is also a letter that says when your child's day to be a guest reader in our classroom is. Please mark this on your calendar and help your child to be confident in reading his/her book to the class. Thanks so much for this. If you need help finding a book, just let me know and I will find one here at school.

Then we worked on math. We are working on graphing and comparing data right now. Students love to do this because we learn so much about each other! For example, we found that more of us like Kit-Kats over Twix!

After that we tested our knowledge and took our reading tests for the week. You may notice a sheet that works on the High-Frequency words of the week. We are working on having the students use the words in sentences and using the 4 other areas that we are looking at. You will notice a short checklist on the back of this paper. You can check this out to help your first grader work on his/her writing skills. 

Finally we worked on our Valentine People. These people are going to hangout in the hall and tell the school who and what we love and why. 

Remember to check out the Pages section to see what we will be working on next week. Please note that we will be taking the NWEA tests next week so make sure your kiddo gets enough sleep to be ready for these tests! Have a great weekend! 

Wednesday, January 28

Today we started with our last day of Tiger Time until February 9. We will be busy taking the NWEA tests and some first grade classes start right at 8:30. We took our Unit 6 pretest and followed with a little super speed math. To start out reading, we worked on finding the subject and the verb in a sentence and making sure that our verb matched the subject of the sentence. We also reviewed contractions which our guest teacher worked on yesterday. For our 1-minute readings we did a reading that we did at the beginning of the school year. It was so fun to show the kiddos how much they have improved in such a short time. We will be working hard again tomorrow! Have a great night!

Monday, January 26

Good Monday Afternoon! We are off and running! When it was time for recess, the kiddos said, "Already? It feels like we just got here!" So needless to say, it has been a busy morning! I wanted to let you know that I will be gone tomorrow. My daughter is having surgery so I need to be with her. As I mentioned, we are continuing to work on the sh, wh, and ph digraphs this week. We will also continue the reading strategies and high-frequency words as well. We will take our math Unit 5 test and Unit 6 pretest this week too. Next week we will be doing our NWEA reading and math benchmarking. Please make sure your child is well rested for this! Have a great week and I will be back on Wednesday!

Wednesday, January 21

This morning we had a guest teacher while I was at a meeting with the other first grade teachers. We started working on adding teen numbers and finding the missing addend. We also started working on cause and effect. Our story for this week and next is called Seasons and we talked about how the weather change is the cause and the things that happen are the effect. Since we are working on three different digraphs this week, we have one less day and we were all gone this morning, the first grade team has decided to do the spelling sounds this week and next. We will also use the high-frequency words, story, vocabulary strategy, and grammar focus next week as well. If you have any questions about this, please email or call me. We will NOT have a spelling test this week. Have a great night!

Thursday, January 15

Yesterday we got back to work on our super speed math and reading. Instead of working on our letters, we are now working on the 100 most commonly used sight words. They are making great progress with their math facts as well! 

This afternoon we worked on homophones (knight vs. night) and how to use context clues to help us figure out which word we should use. The kids had a fun time coming up with homophone pairs to share in class. 

Thursday, January 8

Today we worked on grouping big piles of items into groups of 10's and extra ones. It is always fun to see the kiddos working together to get to an end goal!

We also worked on the th digraph, proper nouns, names with titles, high-frequency words, base words with -s, -es, -ed, and -ing endings, and we did our one minute readings! We were BUSY!!! Stay safe out in this crazy weather!

Sugar cookies!