Miss Bostley's 1st Grade Class
What We're Learning...
Religion
Treat others the way you want them to treat you!
Church behavior is something that we will work on continuously in first grade. Please stress with your children the importance of praying at church, sitting quietly, and reflection during mass.
Phonics
This week's sight words are: name, good, sentence, man, think
This week we will continue learning about "Bossy R." The bossy R tells all the other vowels what to do, when you add an "r" to any of the vowels, it changes the sound that vowel makes!
car
fork
butter
bird
curl
We are still reviewing vowel teams in phonics. As many of you know, when two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking. That means when you see two vowels together, like in the word "team" you only hear the long e sound. We will be working with long a, long e, and long o vowel teams:
ai - rain, paid
ay - stay, play, may
ee - tree, keep
ea - hear, team, bean
oa - boat, cloak
ow - bow, tow, slow
We are still about consonant digraphs. A consonant digraph is made up of two letters that, when put together, make a different sound than either of the letters by themselves. Many consonant digraphs come in the beginning AND ends of words, but some only come in the beginning!
th - them, that, with, path
sh - ship, shape, wash, push
ch - chat, chair, witch, patch
wh - whale, what, when, white (only comes in the beginning of words)
You can help your children by pointing out words like this in the stories you read at home!
Reader's Workshop
Each day, the class will have a whole group activity and then move onto a center. The students will have the opportunity to practice the routines in the beginning of the year until they have mastered it. The children will move to centers based on the table they sit at. The whole group activities will be as follows:
Monday - Weekly News
Tuesday - Squiggle
Wednesday - Poetry
Thursday - Book Review
Once the children have completed this work, they will move onto their centers, which are as follows:
Pocket Chart/Phonics Center
- Here, the children will locate words that have certain beginning and/or ending sounds and sort them on the pocket chart.
- Students will record this on paper and read the words with a partner.
Writing Center
- Children will use writing skills we have learned to complete work in the writing center.
- This can be handwriting skills, sentence structure, capital letters or periods, sequencing, detail writing, etc.
Math Center
- Children will learn many math games during the year that will be implemented in this center.
Write the Room
- Children will have the opportunity to use clipboards and walk around the room to find all different words that correspond with something we are learning each week.
- This might include finding words with a certain beginning sound, with a certain vowel sound, or that match a certain category. This is a lot of fun for our little ones!
Library/Reading Center
- Children will read a leveled book in the library and record sight words they know as well as words that contain chunks they have learned. They will read into the "telephones" we have in our classroom.
Reading Groups
Our friends are such hard workers! I have been meeting with small groups of readers each day to work on phonics skills, reading fluency, and reading comprehension.
How can I help at home?
Great question! Here are some tips:
- Every time you read with your child, stop periodically and ask, "What do you think will happen next?" or "What has been happening so far in the story?" You could ask them "What was the problem in that story?" and then "How was the problem solved?"
- Talk about who the characters in the story are, and where the story is taking place (on a farm, in a classroom, at home or at school...)
- Before reading the words in a story, flip through the book and look at the pictures. Ask your child what he or she notices in the pictures, and see if they can figure out what might happen without even reading yet!
- After you're finished with a book, ask your child what happened in the beginning, middle, and end of the story. Ask about the names of the characters, where the story took place, and what your child's favorite part was.
***These things take about 5 minutes to do with your kids. If they don't know an answer, move on. Don't dwell on what they don't know, but get excited about what they can recall! We want to make reading fun!
Writer's Workshop
We have been working on using different kinds of punctuation marks in writing. We have learned about:
commas: we use these to separate three or more things in a series
I like apples, bananas, and carrots.
We have music, gym, and library this week.
My friends are Susie, Bobby, Paul, and Dan.
Quotation marks: we use these to show what someone has said.
"Where is your pencil?" asked the teacher.
She said, "I like your shirt."
Remember that a period always goes at the end of a telling sentence, a question mark goes after an asking sentence, and an exclamation mark goes after an excited sentence.
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Here is what we have learned about nouns, verbs, and adjectives.
Nouns: a person, place, or thing. A noun is anything you can touch, or any place you can be.
Verbs: an action word. A verb is anything you can do.
Adjectives: a describing word. An adjective tells about a noun.
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We have started working in both reading and writing on how to use the 5 W's and H. When reading a story, we focus on WHO is in the story, WHAT happened in the story (details), WHEN the story took place, WHERE the story took place, and WHY the author wrote the story/WHY the characters did whatever they did. The HOW is a rather difficult concept for little guys to understand, but we talk in school about how the characters did whatever they did in the story, or how the story evolved.
When we are writing, we use the same ideas, but we are the authors this time! We can create our own who, what, where, when, why, and how in our weekend news, squiggles, or stories that we write!
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We are going to continue working on sequencing in writing. This is something that the students will be working on throughout the rest of the school year. It is important that they know how to sequence in writing, and that they are able to use it when they read stories. It will help them retell the events of the story and put it in order. Please work with your children on both reading and writing using sequence words.
First...
Next...
Then...
Last...
Math
We have begun learning to tell time! We are learning time to the hour and time to the half hour on both digital and analog clocks!
We learned about graphs in math last week. These types of graphs include:
picture graphs
tally charts
bar graphs
We have been practicing reading these graphs and creating them as well. We use surveys to collect data and then either record them in our different charts, or we read them to find out the information.
It is very important that everyone understands that there are different ways to make numbers. Like sight words, number combinations should be easily recognized and easy to understand. Your children will come home with flash cards to help them recognize their combinations.
Many of you have asked what you can do at home to reinforce math skills! Here are some suggestions:
- Use anything you have as a math counter: crayons, pencils, pennies and dimes, even food items! Make it fun!
- Ask your children to teach you how to do their homework because "you don't understand." Turn them into a teacher!
Social Studies
We are continuing to learn about different jobs and roles of community members. Some of the things we are learning are about are goods, services, volunteers, and workers. Your children have a great understanding of this so far!
Science
Each week, your children will be introduced to 5 new sight words. As a reinforcement, your children will have daily sight word homework:
Mondays: Write your sight words 3 times each
Tuesdays: Write three sight word sentences
Wednesdays: Write two sight word sentences
Thursdays: Find the sight words in sentences, then write them two times each. Study your sight words for your sight word check on Friday
Your children will also have daily math homework. This will be directly reflective of the lesson that was taught during the day.
Homework Information