Week of January 3 - 6

Dear Parents,                       

We had a great day back!  We hope you all had a wonderful holiday break!  Students were so excited to share all the great things they did over the vacation!  Everyone is doing a beautiful job getting back into our classroom routines, as well!

Here is a look at what we are working on this week:

Reading:  We are continuing to work in our reading groups and centers.  We will be reviewing how to think about our senses as we read.  We will also review characters, settings and character actions.  We will begin discussing how to create mental pictures using the words and the pictures on the pages.  Students will make inferences based on the words and pictures to think about what is happening “between the picture scenes”. 

Word Work/Handwriting:  During this time, students will be continue to work on handwriting and sight words.  We will also be practicing how to change and manipulate words to create new words.  Students will change beginning and ending sounds to make different words.  Students will also be playing a letter matching game at the end of the week. This game will focus on matching uppercase letters to their lowercase letters.  We are encouraging students to use lower case letters as they write unless it’s the beginning of a sentence or a special name or holiday. 

Writing:  Students have been learning about “How To” books.  We are in the “collecting” phase of our workshop and students have been generating many great ideas for their books.  This week, students will take their ideas and form them into steps via pictures and words.  An example is; “how to make a snowman”.  Students will think of the steps necessary to build a snowman, draw the steps, and translate them into words.  We are focusing on being very specific so that their audience can get a clear idea of the steps that need to be taken.

Math:  Before the break, we were discussing ways to sort and organize objects.  This week, we will review ways to sort objects based on their attributes.  We will be sorting buttons and playing “guess my rule” with objects and with people!  Towards the end of the week, we will begin investigating, recording and analyzing data through quick surveys and classroom discussions. 

Science: This week in science, we will pick up where we left off with our discussions about living things.  We will revisit our KWL charts (what we know, what we would like to know, and what we have learned) and we will begin investigating the different habitats of living things.

We hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

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