Dear Families,
It was great seeing you at our conferences last week. Thank you for taking the time to meet up and chat about your child’s learning and life at school.
Here is our week in review:
Social-Emotional Learning:
This week, the students continued to apply the listening skills we have learned in the last few weeks. They practiced whole body listening and eyes on the speaker in all classes when adults and peers were sharing. They are making such amazing progress and learning so much from each other when they are “brain in”, have eyes on the speaker and showing calm, quiet bodies.
Last week, the students created calming pictures for our restorative circles. They used markers, crayons and/or water colors. They are such amazing artists! This week, we used them as part of our center pieces for the circle times. We use these beautiful pictures in our restorative circles so the students can look at them as a way to help them focus.
This week, the students filled our classroom jar again for being safe, kind, and responsible. This time, we celebrated with choice time in math. It was great to see the students make independent choices and explore math concepts with friends.
You Can:
Your child has another HomeLink from our SEL Curriculum Second Step in the Home Folder today. As always, it is optional to do this at home but we encourage families to engage in these conversations at home too. Not only can you connect with our learning goals and social language, you can also implement strategies for home too! This week’s HomeLink reflects our work around focusing attention, something that the students have worked on for quite some time now. They are experts and I am sure they will teach you all about these strategies at home!
Reading:
This week, the students had the opportunity to rotate through different stations during our reading block. Sometimes the students will meet with the teacher/adult and receive targeted, differentiated reading instruction to meet the reading needs of the members of the group. Sometimes, the students will engage in independent reading; a time when they are encouraged to read “just right”/decodable books (books assigned by the teacher/adults to reinforce phonological skills taught). The students will also engage in choice books during these times. We recently received some generous donations of “Dog Man” and “Piggie and Gerald” books to add to our classroom library so the students have had some new and exciting books to read as well.
You can:
You can support your child’s emerging reading skills at home too by encouraging your child to read every day. If you read together with your child this week, think about how you can encourage your child to pay close attention to the sounds the letters make. How about playing an alphabet scavenger hunt? Ask your child to find a particular letter on the page. Make it more challenging by asking your child to say the sound a particular letter says.
Thank you for accessing Lexia at home. Lexia is a fabulous online reading program that promotes student learning in phonics, phonological awareness, fluency and comprehension. Thank you for reading daily with your child at home too. Listening to fluent readers read authentic, interesting texts helps emerging readers develop a deeper understanding of literacy and a love of reading!
Writing:
The students are learning about how to create proper sentences with first grade benchmarks. In our writing curriculum (Bookworms), they are learning that complete sentences must have a subject (who and what) as well as a predicate (verb/action words). We underline these parts in our sentences using different colored crayons and count out how many words we use in each sentence. The students are also learning to ask themselves “Does this make sense?” before they write their sentence down. They are doing an outstanding job creating proper sentences with complete and interesting ideas.
This week, first grade authors also learned that subjects can be “many” (such as Sarah and Pete) and substituted with pronouns such as “they, he, she, it”. First grade authors also practiced finger-spacing between words, proper lower (and upper) case letter writing and tapping out the sounds they hear in CVC words. CVC words are short vowel words, with a beginning consonant, followed by a vowel and another consonant. Some of the words we practiced this week were: nap, bin, fin, cat, dog, nut, tub, red and bat.
First grade writers also learned how to differentiate between when to use the letter c for spelling words starting with the /k/ sound, and when to use the letter k. To help young learners know the difference, we call it “The Cat/Kite Rule”. Here is a song that helps them remember the spelling options. Enjoy!
You Can:
You can support your child’s emerging phonological awareness and skills at home too. Ask your child to explain how we tap out the sounds at school. Ask your child to isolate the sounds too. For example, if you say the word nap, what is the middle/vowel sound? What is the beginning sound? Ending sound? Notice how you ask for the sound, not the letter. What happens if you replace the /n/ sound in nap with the /m/ sound? What is the new word? The students love these games!
Math:
This week, first grade mathematicians continued to rotate through our math learning stations. They are truly amazing mathematicians and so focused and engaged. We continued to build a conceptual understanding of decomposing and composing numbers to 10 (and 20). The students practiced using gems to build an understanding of the differences between 2 groups and groups of 2, 3 groups and groups of 3, etc. Ask your child to explain. Ask your child to explain how grouping objects together can help them organize their thinking so they can solve math problems more efficiently and not rely on counting by ones.
First grade mathematicians also practiced finding the number “just before” and the number “just after” another number (in the range 1-20)
You can:
You can support your child’s flexibility with numbers by emphasizing the strategies used to solve a particular math problem. For example, if your child is solving 9+6 at home, rather than asking for “the answer” (which we call the sum), ask your child to explain how the problem was solved. If your child shares that he/she used his/her fingers to count, encourage your child to find another way to solve the same problem. We have discovered multiple pathways together as a class already in our daily number conversations and warm ups.. The students have discovered many different addition strategies already. “Counting on” is a class favorite. Counting on promotes number efficiency as the students are encouraged to start with the greater number and “count on” from that number to find the sum. Another favorite strategy in class is finding “double facts” first and then adding (or subtracting) the remainder. Some students also anchor to 10 first as a strategy. I tell the students that the number 10 is my BFF so I try to find 10 anywhere I can!
News and Reminders:
We have no school on Friday 11/1 due to Diwali.
Have a great weekend,
Maria
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