First Grade News
Check Out What’s Happening in First Grade!
THE LATEST SCOOP ON LEARNING
It is hard to imagine that we are into the last half of the school year. Since September, we have met many benchmarks and milestones in first grade. The children have worked hard but our work has not ended. At home, continue to monitor good work and study habits so that your child is prepared for the school day and is able to meet the expectations of the curriculum. Reviewing first grade sight words often and reading together to increase your child’s fluency is highly recommended. As always, thank you for your home support and the many generous contributions for our classroom. It is appreciated by all!
JANUARY HIGHLIGHTS
Gingerbread Trap STEM Challenge
We would like to give a special thanks to those who contributed materials to make this challenge a success!
Spelling Sorts
Spelling City!
Addition Strategies
Making Word Problems
Count On
Make a Ten
Act it Out
Martin Luther King Jr. Thank You Letters
After learning parts of a letter, students wrote thank you letters to Martin Luther King Jr.
Epic Science!
Students have also learned how to Airplay to share facts they have learned about landforms, ways we use natural resources, weathering, and erosion.
Looking into February...
One month into the new year! Time surly flies when we are learning and having fun! There are many exciting things going on this month as well as many great learning opportunities. Here’s what’s coming up!
Reading
As great readers we have a lot of jobs to do when reading a story. Students need to be careful readers of the words on the page, while also thinking about and processing the story. During reading we have really been working on comprehension questions that make us think deeper about the story. These are questions that help us make connections, infer character feelings, think about why the author wrote the story, and share our opinions about the story, plus much more!
We will be working with the following comprehension skills & strategies:
- Fact & Opinion: A fact tells something that can be proved true by observing, checking in a book, or asking an expert. An opinion tells someone's idea or feeling about something. It cannot be proved true or false.
- Text Structure: Good readers pay attention to the order, or sequence, in which things happen in their reading.
- Draw Conclusions: Authors don't explain everything that happens in a story. They let us use what we have read and what we know from real life to figure some things out for ourselves. This is called drawing conclusions.
- Building Background Knowledge: Good readers connect what they read to things they have read before and things they know from their own experience to help them understand their reading.
1st graders have been working so hard on close reading and digging deeper into the text.
Writing
This month in writing, we will work on staying on topic and writing research reports, fictional stories, & realistic stories with a logical sequence. Writing has stepped up a notch for the second half of first grade to prepare for second grade expectations. We are looking for mastery of conventions (capitalization and punctuation). First graders should be writing with many details and developing focused and interesting stories. As always, sight words should be spelled correctly any time they are written.
Math Mad Minutes
Addition and subtraction are extremely important for 1st Graders to master. Each student needs to be able to quickly recall addition and subtraction facts to be ready for 2nd grade. To help assess this skill, we will begin giving weekly addition and subtraction tests.
Each week, students will take an addition test and a subtraction test. Each test will have 30 questions on it. Our goal is that students are able to do the problems in less than 1 minute. For some students, it will take the rest of the year to obtain this goal, especially on the subtraction tests. Subtraction is hard and takes longer to learn than addition.
Please do not worry if it takes your child several weeks to reach this goal especially with subtraction. With practice at home and at school, most students will be able to reach this goal by May. Please help your child with this important skill by practicing addition and subtraction facts at home.
Math
Students will begin working on how to organize, represent, and interpret data using a tally chart, picture graph, and bar graph. You can help your child by reviewing the vocabulary words, completed math homework, and each lesson See and Show & On My Own. This will also help reinforce the concepts taught at school.
Ask your child what close reading in math is!
Close Reading Math Word Problems: TIPS TO HELP CHILDREN BUILD MATH PROBLEM-SOLVING SKILLS
1. Read the question carefully.
Have him read and reread the question to make sure that he understands what he is being asked to solve. Encourage him to read the question aloud and pay close attention to the final question of the word problem.
2. Understand the problem.
Encourage her to simplify the word problem by highlighting the main words and important ideas. Have your child ask herself the following questions: What am I being asked to do? What are the important facts? Do I have enough information to solve the problem? What operation will I use?
3. Convert the verbal statement into a mathematical equation.
Help him break the word problem into manageable, ordered steps. It's a good idea to do the work one step at a time, particularly if it's a complicated problem with several parts. It's easier to keep the pieces of the problem in order if he works this way and easier to avoid mistakes. Have him begin by identifying key words such as "add," "altogether," "less," and "are left" that indicate certain mathematical operations.
4. Generate the result.
Encourage her to solve the mathematical problem using a technique such as drawing or mentally acting out the problem. After she finishes, make sure the results make sense and that she writes the answer in the appropriate units (e.g., hours, meters, miles, etc.). As a final step, have her translate the answer back into English. For example, "The son is 13 years old."
Ask your child about our CUBES strategy!
Social Studies
This month in social studies we will continue to focus on learning how historical figures have changed and shaped our country with special emphasis on past and present presidents such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Barack Obama. We will also learn about famous Americans who showed the character traits of fairness, responsibility, respect, caring, trustworthiness and citizenship.
We are excited about an opportunity to work on a special research project to learn about American Symbols & Landmarks. It should be a lot of fun integrating technology and research skills to learn more about the most famous landmarks in our history.