John C. Daniels

What a busy week we all had last week. We spent our time working hard!

We will continue to work extra hard this week for the 3 days of school. We are starting our spelling words that are VERY important to study each day. A letter was sent home that describes the added HW for the week. Along with the READING and MATH homework, the students will have SPELLING homework daily.

Mondays- write the words in ABC order

Tuesday- Use each word in a separate sentence

Wednesday- Write each word 3 times each

Thursday- Study for the test on Friday morning.

 

Remember: We do not have class on Thursday or Friday.

In reading we will continue to work on connections that we have to the text. In an informative text (non-fiction) the students are working on identifying the main idea and details that support it. They will also be able to express the clues that helped them decipher the main idea and the details.

Writing has been a little difficult for some students. We are working on always starting on the left side of the paper and writing until we reach the end of the right side. We are also teaching our "finger spaces" which is when we put our pinky finger on the paper after a word to ensure that we have a space in between words. Lastly we are making sure we use capital letters at the beginning of our sentences and punctuation at the end. 

Math is still reviewing a little of what the students learned last year. We are learning about “number families” or “number bonds” These are important words that will follow the students as they move from grade to grade. The work sent home will show what these bonds look like.

In social studies the students are learning about people in our community and what their jobs are that help us. Last week we spoke about families and the jobs each one of us has at home. (washing dishes, cooking, making the bed) This week we are talking about people in our school community and their jobs. Each and every person has a job in each community that we are a part of.

Last but not least we have Science. In Science we are learning about comparing objects, people and measuring. Friday, the students made a Venn Diagram comparing themselves to a friend. This week we will continue with our comparisons and measuring unit in Science.

Hello Parents and guardians,

We have started the year strong and would like to continue. I have signed our class up for the Scholastic Book Club and if you would like to go to their website at Scholastic.com and order with the code  H2CXH .  This will help us gain a larger library for our classroom. We often read these stories for enjoyment as well as working for our Magnet theme. These are also books that may be read at night during your bedtime routine. We will hand out flyers when they come into school. Thank you!

1st grade team

Hello Parents and Guardians!

Thank you to all the parents who joined us on Wednesday night for a great kick off to our year. There was an abundance of information, and if there are any questions as we go along PLEASE feel free to ask! We enjoyed being able to put some parent faces to student faces and discuss our expectations and find out individual ways we may be able to help your child.

            This past week in phonics we worked on word families and words that rhyme. When you read with your child one activity is to find words on the page that are similar or that rhyme. This will keep them actively involved in their reading.

            In read aloud and shared reading we worked on the job of readers. As a reader we have a job to figure out, make a connection, notice, and predicting what might be next. We read a story And to Think That We Thought That We Would Never be Friends, and this story talks about having differences, yet we can still be friends and we need to treat each other nicely. When we read this story we found our favorite part and then had to explain why. We used the following outline:

My favorite part of the story is _____________________________because_________

This outline helps prepare the students as they begin writing sentences and stories. We will be sending these types of outlines home with the students as homework in the future.

            In writing we have talked about action words and what we like to do. We followed the same outline as in reading to keep a common format that the students will learn. As the year goes on we will take the outline away and the students will come up with their whole sentence independently.

            Math has started at a very basic level of understanding numbers 1-10 and patterns. The students have shown great mastery in most aspects but some still have trouble writing the number words out. An example of that is 3 is “three”. We will continue to work on this as we add difficulty into our math lessons. We are following a new program that starts very concrete and then moves to the abstract. The students seem to really enjoy Math so far!

            Social Studies is all about Communities and the World in our Backyard. We have talked about what a community is and what helpers are in each community. We talked about our family community, our school community, our neighborhood, the hospital, the police and firemen as well as a church community. Next week we will take our family community and go into more detail about the important roles each one of us has in our family community.

            Science will begin next week. We will talk about measurements and comparisons. This will go right along with the comparisons we have been making in math this week of more than, less than, same, greater than, less than and equal.

Good morning,

          We have sent a letter home explaining out behavior plan. We use the "street light" system in our classrooms. We all start on green and if we have some trouble in class we will move our tag to yellow 1 then yellow 2 and sometimes might get to red. We hope all our students will stay on green. If the student stays on green for the 5 days of the week, the student will be able to choose a prize from our treasure box.

           Homework is the next topic of business that we are working out in class. Each child will have 2 folders. One is for English HW(157) and the second is for Spanish HW(158). Each day the student will put the folders in the correct bins when they get to school. This routine is VERY important. At the end of the day the student will take their folder home to do their HW and bring the folder back the next morning with the HW completed. Please help your child have their HW in the correct folder.

          Lastly, our program has changed a little. Each child, English or Spanish native will have reading and writing instruction in both languages from the beginning of the year. With this, the students will switch the classroom that they begin in weekly. This week (September 6th), homeroom 157 is starting the morning in room 158 and homeroom 158 is starting their morning in 157. The week of Spetember 12th, homeroom 157 will start in 157 and homeroom 158 will begin in 158. Every week the students will switch the clasroom they begin in.

If you have any questions please contact the 1st grade team,

203-691-3600

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