1st Grade News
November 15, 2015
Upcoming Events
11/17 - Marcel's Birthday - Happy Birthday Marcel!
11/18 - In House Field Trip - The Traveling Trunk
11/19 - Picture Retakes
11/19 - Family Reading Night (6:00 - 7:30)
11/20 - PBIS - Game Day Celebration!
11/23 - Bryce's Birthday - Happy Birthday Bryce!
11/24 - One Hour Early Dismissal (2:35)
11/25 - No Student Attendance
11/26 - Happy Thanksgiving - No School
11/27 - No Student Attendance
12/04 - Report Cards go home
Candy Collection Turn In!
We are in need of some donations...
If you have any extra children's socks that have lost their mate, please send them to school with your student. They make great erasers for our white boards!
Thank you!!
The Global Read Aloud
Our Global Read Aloud ended with quite a bang! We took part in the:
Glow - Hopefully you saw glow sticks come home
Ball - We couldn't really dress up, so we settled for mustaches and tiaras
Read - Boy did we read!
Dahl - We read poems by Roald Dahl - it was tricky finding ones appropriate for 1st graders!
Loud - We shouted the words that rhymed in the poems
We also Skyped with our new Canadian friends. We took turns sharing our Roald Dahl poems, and shared the Amy Krouse Rosenthal book we chose to end this very special project. I shared "I Wish You More" (Have you read this story yet? I highly recommend you read it to your son/daughter with a box of tissues on hand), and they shared "Friendshape". We also shared some wishes that we made for them. We decided we want to stay in touch with our new friends and look forward to Skyping with them again!
Class Twitter Account
Math Update
We have begun our unit on adding and subtracting within 20. You should be seeing student work coming home just about every night. If you are not, please let me know and I will make sure work is not getting lost in desks or lockers. :) I have grouped students according to the results of a preassessment so that they are working at an appropriate level.
We have been using the addition strategy of Counting On. We encourage students to start at the larger number and only count on the second addend. It is much easier than starting at one all the time!
The students have been using addition strategies to solve word problems. Sometimes, the word problems are written at a higher level than our kiddos can read. I always read the word problem to them, as I am only concerned with their math skills, not reading. Please feel free to do the same at home! I also allow students to use manipulatives to help them solve these problems. It is pretty hard for these little ones to think abstractly. Most of the time, they need concrete (or pictorial) help.
The end of the year expectation for first graders is to be able to count and recognize numbers from 0 - 120, as well as to show the value for each numeral. Students also need to be fluent in solving addition and subtraction problems within 10.
Reading Update
In Reader's Workshop we are continuing to analyze the characters in our books. Students are not only asked to identify the characters, but to dig deeper and discuss how a character has changed throughout the course of the story and why that change has occurred.
Our Guided Reading time is up and running! I am working with small groups of students while the rest of the students are working independently.
I have started sending the leveled text we are using during Guided Reading home with the students to read to you. Please make sure that the book comes back to school the next day. Thanks for your help!
Writing Update
We have continued writing Realistic Fiction stories across multiple pages in a booklet. The students have created their characters and created a problem and solution to their problem. While we are learning about this genre of writing, we will continue to work on adding spaces between words, using capital letters to start our sentences and punctuation to end our sentence, using the word wall to spell high frequency words correctly, and adding details to our writing.
Our writing will be published before Thanksgiving Break. When we return from break we will be moving on to writing nonfiction pattern books.
Math Fun
Robert Frost Library Checkout Days
Homework
The students are also bringing home math homework almost nightly. Please remember that this does not need to come back to school. Feel free to use it as your family seems fit.
Mrs. Elizabeth Loverde
Email: Loverde.Elizabeth@ccsd59.org
Website: http://frost.ccsd59.org/teachers/loverdeelizabeth/
Location: 1308 Cypress Drive, Mount Prospect, IL, United States
Phone: (847) 593-4378
Twitter: @llizl1