I'd like to thank you all for your patience with me these last few weeks. We spent a great deal of time working in our expedition expert groups in preparation for our Celebration of Learning. We've not only become experts on frogs, but also experts on presenting informative material so that others can learn from us. I am very proud of all the hard work our first graders produced and displayed at our Celebration.
Today marks the end of our Language Arts class. I have so enjoyed teaching this group of kids. Together we have learned how to read, how to handle the challenges of having more than one teacher during the school year, and how to become excellent authors who publish interesting works of writing.
If your child still has their Baggie Book at home, please return those to me right away so that I can take inventory and begin preparing for my upcoming first graders. Also, your child should have brought home their sight word packet. These are the sight word packets that our volunteer, Mrs. Marz, used to work with your child. I strongly encourage each student to continue to practice these sight words over the summer so that when school resumes next year and Mrs. Marz comes back, we can knock her socks off with our terrific sight word memories!
Lastly, I have finished assessing reading levels for the last time this school year. If you'd like to know your child's exact reading level, feel free to email me. Otherwise, I will report reading levels on the end of year report card as either reading above grade level, reading at grade level, or reading below grade level. Over the summer months, please continue to read with your child. There is greater retention when reading is practiced during the summer months.
Thanks!
Weekly Update: April 15, 2012
As we move into the last few weeks of school, it's still important to keep reading those baggie books. We're in the final push and I'd like to see everyone make their reading goals before the school year ends. As a reminder, baggie books should be returned to school every Monday and Wednesday.
If your child is working on book projects, those are due tomorrow, April 16th. I will send home another project by the end of the week.
In spelling this week, we'll be working on skill building so there will not be a spelling test this week. Look for spelling homework to come home mid-week.
Thanks!
Weekly Update: April 8, 2012
Hello! Just a quick update to fill you in on all the great learning that occurred last week!
We began learning about a new reading comprehension strategy: Inferring. Students love inferring! We pretend we are inference investigators looking for clues in both pictures and in words. We've learned that inferencing is a good tool to use when the answers to our questions aren't found within the story. Last week, students were given case files in which they had to infer the meaning behind pieces of evidence. Using these clues, students were able to make predictions and create a timeline of events in the day of Tim and Grandma Sue. We'll continue practicing inferencing this coming week.
Your child should have given you some homework (not too hard..I promise!) this past week. Since we have been learning how to make our sentences more interesting, mainly through the use of good descriptive words that help paint pictures in our minds, we thought it might be fun to have our parents describe us. We spent a few days this week sharing the descriptive words our parents used to describe each of us. If you haven't done this, don't worry! We'll continue working with descriptive words again this week.
We will be assessing our spelling words this week. As a reminder, we will test on the following sight words: and, is, they, or, by, one, had, not. Our goals with spelling are to not only spell the sight words correctly, but to be able to recognize when to use the correct sight word within a given sentence. Students will complete a pre-test on Tuesdays and bring home any words they need to work on. If your child gets all of the words correct on Tuesday's pre-test, they do not have to complete the test on Friday.
Keep reading those baggie books or working on book projects (if your child reads above grade level)! We are making good reading progress! Students should be reading for at least 15 minutes each night.
Thanks!
Weekly Update: March 26, 2012
For the last few weeks, we have been identifying what is most important in the works that we read. For instance, when reading fiction, we know to look for these key elements:
- characters
- setting
- problem
- solution (the band aid)
- climax (the most exciting part)
- main ideas (what the author wants us to learn)
- titles
- photographs
- captions
- varying font sizes
- different colors of words
- graphs
- maps
- labels
- diagrams
- table of contents
- glossary
- index
In spelling, we continue to work on homophones, "sleepy e" versus "bossy e", and stretching out our sentences so they are more interesting to read. We call these "Max and May" sentences. For example, we took the sentence, "They have one or two of them." and after several revisions turned it into, "Max and May have one or two white cars." This week is another skill building week and next week we will test on the following sight words: and, is, they, or, by, one, had, not. Our goals with spelling are to not only spell the sight words correctly, but to be able to recognize when to use the correct sight word within a given sentence.
As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to email me.
