Week of January 23-27

Dear Parents, 

Hats off to all of our students!  We had another wonderful week of school, with even a little snow on the ground.  Students are working hard to learn about writing persuasive letters.   Great news....our final math assessment for unit four was very successful and students are eager to continue onto unit five, focusing on measurement.  Students have started to measure collections of objects and understand the meaning of “length”.

Here is a look at what we will work on next week:

Reading: We have been working on our January assessments and will continue to show how much we have grown as confident readers.  We will pick up where we left off by reviewing schema and bring our own personal experiences to what we are reading. Students will practice using schema before, during, and after reading to gain a deeper understanding of what we have read.  Our week will conclude by making connections to character's actions and events that are occurring in the story.

Word Work/Handwriting: Next week, students will recognize spelling patterns in words and begin sorting words that have similar spelling patterns.  Games and activities will be introduced to help teach different spelling patterns and write words with similar patterns.  We will end our week with handwriting practice of letters ‘S’, ‘A’, ‘I’, and ‘J’ and review of our first grade sight words.

Writing: We will take what we learned about persuasive writing to start collecting pieces of writing.  The children have a long list of topics to choose from and are eager to begin creating their own pieces.  We will use our Post Office-style writing center to select paper for our letters, to address our letters, choose envelopes, and stamp our work before it is sent.  To address our letters, we will use the address books we put together last week.  If students have not finished and returned their address books, please do so by Tuesday, January 24th. Students are very excited to mail their persuasive letters and see who will be able to change the minds of their readers.

Math: Students have been excited about measuring using different units in math this past week!  Next week, we will take a close look at both digital and analog time.  Using our daily schedule we will begin to tell time for what we are doing throughout the day.  A revisit of story problems will take place along with comparing and contrasting measurements.  We will begin looking at measurement vocabulary that we can use when explaining the length of objects.

Science: Once again, our animal unit continues to be our favorite topic in science.  We have learned many different things about mammals, including their physical characteristics.  Students compared a fish and mammal to see how they are similar and different.  We even learned the definition of warm-blooded and cold-blooded to better understand how fish and mammals are different in how they adapt to their environment.

We hope you have a wonderful weekend!

~Your first grade teachers: Miss Field and Mrs. McIntire