First Grade Fun
This week in review...
Reading
We continue to work on fluency!! Many students are really looking at all the punctuation when the read and you can here the inflection when reading aloud. When you are listening to your child read watch as they are using the punctuation to help drive their fluency.
We also had a new group of books on loan to our classroom. I went to a seminar on children's literature and had my own "ah ha" moment. The Professor teaching the session talked about the local library's influx of new books each month. I hit up the Royal Oak library last week and grabbed some recently published books. The books that were two thumbs up will probably be added to our library via my personal library, you may have heard of it Amazon.com :)
Math
Chapter 8 begins... We are working on counting coins again with this chapter. We are also reviewing place value. Everyone is doing a great job with using flats, longs and cubes (base 10 blocks) to work out complex math problems.
Spelling!!
At conferences, we talked about adding wall words back into the spelling mix. On Friday, we had our first spelling test. It wasn't pretty :(. I feel very strongly about the students knowing how to spell the first grade high frequency words. A lot of the words do not follow patterns. They just need to be memorized. I am going to start having the students keep class data. Friday we had one 100% out of 16. The spelling assessments are going to have four parts: wall words, pattern words, "Words their Way" words and a dictated sentence. Here is a free app to practice words that you input.
https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/a+-spelling-test/id501211008?mt=8
Here is a site that gives you many different ways to practice spelling words.
http://www2.sd5.k12.mt.us/elrod/multiage/Spelling.html
Medicine that Matters
Oops - It is at Groves!! I have been telling the students Seaholm.
Location: 20500 West Thirteen Mile Road, Beverly Hills, MI