Week of March 2-6

Dear parents,

This week in First Grade we are excited to turn the calendar to the month of March because March is reading month! The challenge is on for the school to read 200,000 minutes. All students are encouraged to read at home and log their minutes to beat the goal so that Mr. Bender can be a kid for the day! Logs are due every Monday. Please add up the minutes for the week and send it to school,  logs will be returned until the next week. Reading to your child counts as well!

Hopefully the weather begins to warm up. In the meantime continue to send boots, hats, mittens, etc. If you are missing items from home- the lost and found has many things in it and it may be wise to come have a look for your child's missing things.

In reading this week, we have read A Seal Pup Grows Up. We read the book and compared it to the book from last week about Kangaroo Joey. I'm amazed at how well the students retain facts about what they've read! The love non fiction books! We are still working on "I wonder" statements and making text to text connections in our reading workshop for comprehension strategies.

Our popcorn words this week are: very, funny, cry, sky, by, dirty.  We have talked about the two sounds that y can make at the ends of words. We sorted words with the "eye" sound and words that sound like "ee" at the end. 

We are continuing to work on fact families this week. Monday I introduced fact triangles,  we cut them out and practiced writing the facts. We talked about how fact families have a dad(biggest number) a mom (middle number) and a baby (the smaller number). The biggest number has to come first when we subtract and the smaller numbers are added together to make the biggest number.  We will focus on just subtraction facts this week as well.

In writing, the students were so excited to begin writing Tiny Topics in their very own little notebooks.

The notebooks are used for "seed ideas" not for the whole story.  We will learn how to write "comeback lines" like the author Angela Johnson this week and continue examining authors to see what ways we can make our writing better.

In Social Studies, we will read the book Alexander Who Used to be Rich Last Sunday. We will discuss opportunity costs. I'll also use this book to teach the character traits careless and irresponsible because he was careless and irresponsible with his money!

Thank you and have a good week!

Mrs. Scheck