Updates
May
Dates and Announcements
May 14th Museum of Natural Science in Raleigh Field Trip
May 20th Field Day
First grade is so excited to announce that we've been accepted as a team to attend the 2015 Lucy Calkins Summer Reading Institute at Columbia University! This is a wonderful opportunity for us to enrich our understanding of the curriculum, represent Seawell and CHCCS on a large scale, and most importantly impact student learning. We appreciate all your support of our classroom and school and wanted to let you know about the opportunity to support this professional development at
Reading
Readers meet the characters in books!
This unit focuses on using all we know to read for meaning in fiction. We enter the world of our books to get to know the characters and the story. We focus on their thoughts, actions, feelings, and how they change through the story. We've used the realistic fiction series to mentor our writing. Here are some of the great characters we've met:
Writing
We are realistic fiction series writers! This unit harnesses children's imagination. They use their own life, book stories, and imagination to create characters in realistic stories....and then they just keep going! By now many of our writers have either a chapter book or two books in their series.
Word Study
We're onto kinds of words: verbs, nouns, adjectives, homophones, synonyms and antonyms to name a few.
Math
What time is it? How do I solve that?
From telling time to the hour and half hour to using all the addition and subtraction strategies we know to solve problems, we're practicing real-life math skills. Telling time is a tricky skill, but as we all know very important! A great way to keep this work going at home is to point out the time you do things and offer opportunities to solve number problems (We have 10 apples. We need 2 for lunch. How many will we have left?)
Social Studies
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs
Our Amazing Body unit brought a lot of interest around jobs. From scientists, to researchers, to butchers and bakers and football players we are very interested in what people do and how they do it. We now know:
- good and services
- jobs then, now and in the future
- job vs volunteering
Next, we'll be learning needs versus wants and integrating our social studies and math to create stores. The children will provide a good or service and sell it to their classmates based on a job schedule. More to come on this exciting venture!
Below is a link to sign-up to share your job with us. All professions welcome!
Science
First grade space learning focuses on the Earth, Moon, and Sun. The goal is for students to know and understand:
- what they are
- how they rotate and orbit
- the massiveness of space
- general space exploration
- day vs night around the world
We learn to understand Earth by integrating our units this year: balance and motion (gravity), living things, and geology.