We had another great week in first grade!
Reading - This week we practiced and practiced read to self, read to someone, and listening. We did add the fourth component - work on writing. The students are loving the writing center right now. Some of the choices for the writing center are writing stories, recipes, lists, post cards, friendly letters, cards, and poems, making squiggles, and writing the room. This week we will continue to build stamina with all four - and then start adding the fifth component - word work.
Phonics (Fundations) - We are continuing to work on CVC words. This week we used sentence frames for the first time. We use the sentence frames to write sentences. (Here is a picture of sentence frames from the Wilson Fundations website.)
Each sentence frame is one word. If there is a high part in the beginning the students know it will be a word that starts with a capital letter. There are also sentence frames for punctuation at the end of the sentence. This week I dictated a sentence and the students had to write the sentence on their white boards. We then had students come to the board and put their words on the sentence frames.
The words in the sentences contain another new thing for us - trick words and vocabulary words. (The vocab words are also know words of the day.)
In fundations trick words are another word for sight words. Last week our trick words were
a, the, and, of, is, and his.
The vocabulary words are words that are something we are currently studying. Our current unit is CVC words. Our first vocabulary word was fix.
Writing - We continue to work on our writing skills. We worked on another sheet with four choices. This week the theme was - What is your favorite food? The 4 choices were soup, burgers, hot dogs, and pizza. We will continue to work on the four choices sheets, write in our Fundations journals, and write in daily 5. We continue to work on only using a capital letter for the first word in the sentence, finger spacing, using punctuation at the end of a sentence, and drawing a wow picture to go with your work. We will also continue to work on our handwriting. We have handwriting pages that we work on throughout the week both during writing and phonics - as well as using our Fundations whiteboards to practice correct letter formation.
Math - This week in math we worked on addition story problems, doubles facts, and identifying rectangles. We used cubes to work out our story problems and our doubles facts. Doubles are addition equations where the two partners are the same. (1+1, 2+2, 3+3, etc.) We practiced doubles up to 10+10=20. We learned a fun song called the doubles rap. You can click on it here.
When learning about rectangles, we learned that rectangles have four sides and four angles. They are different from squares - although squares have four sides and four angles - all four sides are the same size. With rectangles, there are two short and two long sides. We used geoboards to make squares and rectangles.
Religion - This week we read out of our text for the first time. Our first chapter was titled Jesus is our friend. After reading though the assignment was for us to draw a picture of people that we love. :) We continue to practice our prayers - this week we added The Glory Bee to the prayers we are learning/practicing. We continue to work on the sign of the cross and genuflecting. This week we also started working on our virtues and values cards. Our first virtue word is RESPECT. The cards show us what respect looks like and sounds like, shares a prayer, and has a saint. So far our two virtues cards have shown respect looking like not interrupting others when they are speaking and listening attentively to others.
Science/Social Studies - This week in our Einstein Kit we learned about wind. We are keeping a wind graph for one week. We also learned about observing the weather with our senses. (eyes, ears, hands, and nose. We're not using the mouth in science. :) We are also working on a weather calendar for the month. We keep track of three things.
Cloud cover (cloudy, partly cloudy, sunny, or foggy)
Precipitation (rain, snow, hail, no precipitation)
Wind (no wind, some wind, strong wind)
We didn't work on a Scholastic News this week - we did the MAP test instead. We will for sure get to it next week!
A Few FYIs
*We did our first MAP test Friday. We will have our second MAP test this coming Friday. Please keep reviewing mouse skills with your child. Make sure your child has a good breakfast and gets plenty of sleep. Thank you!
*Friday, September 18th we will have our first Packer dress day!
*Lysol spray - If you can find any Lysol spray, please think about donating it to school. We use it at least twice a day every day on the carpets, lockers, mailboxes, chairs, seat sacks, and anything soft that we can't use wipes on. We would appreciate it so very much!!!
A few recess pictures -
