Ms. Knight's Community 1 Newsletter
Live, Laugh, Learn, & Love First Grade
February 8-12, 2016; February 15-19, 2016
PRS Playground
We took the opportunity to use this experience as a learning tool. Learners were excited to write and share their feelings about having a playground and which equipment they liked best.
Polar Bear Projects
Theme Project-Polar Bears
Mystery Reader
It's such surprise to hear mysterious knocks at our door each week. Don't forget to sign-up by clicking the the link below.
Freshgrade Update
Dear Parents, FreshGrade released updates that changed the icons that are viewable in your child’s Portfolio. As a parent, you will now see the new icons. Besides eliminating the red dot, other changes are that the “Meeting and Approaching Expectations” now have a high and low end; allowing the Lead Learners to show a wider range of student learning. Please let me know if you have any questions in regards to the changes!
We're Learning...
- Daily Graphing
- Regrouping Addition
- Telling Time
- Opinion writing is an important skill for young learners to develop. As they learn how to share their opinions in writing, learners will begin to develop an understanding of how to form strong points, how to structure a story using opinions, reasons, examples, and the restatement of opinions. We call this OREO writing. Keeping in mind, the three must haves: a capital letter at the beginning of every sentence, a punctuation mark at the end of each sentence, & capitalization of proper nouns. In addition we are working on good sentence structure in writing. Focusing on writing complete sentences with adjectives and adverbs, while using the correct subject-verb agreement.
- Learners are progressing well with reading sights words, however they are unable to spell many of them correctly in their writing. Some common misspelled words observed during Journal Writing include: because, some, first, next, is,you, are, when, why, friend, they, that, would, why, when, where, said, many, went, also, really, and house.
Discussing the Role of Rosa Parks in African American History
Something Exciting Added to Our Daily Instruction
- Secret Stories is an enjoyable set of charts and poems that targets abstract phonemic skills and increase learner-automaticity in both reading and writing. Skills are introduced based on the needs of learners during Shared and Guided Reading. As an reinforcement of the learned phonemic skills, the poems are sent home on Tuesday and Thursday of each week. Please review the sounds and letter patterns with your child.
Upcoming Events
- February 12-Valentine's Day Party 1:20-2:05; (Don't forget to bring in decorated bags/boxes on Thursday, February 11th)
- February 15 – Professional Development Day (No school for learners)
- February 25 at 6:00 – Multicultural Festival and Taste of the World PTSA Meeting
- February 22– Field Trip to Baptist Health’s Let’s Pretend Hospital
How Can I Help at Home?
Some leading questions in math are:
- How do you use your watch to tell time?
- What does the short hand tells? What does the long hand tells?
- We are leaving for school/church in ten minutes, what time will it be. (in ten minutes, thirty-minutes, in one hour)
- It's ________ and your basketball game/gymnastic practice starts in an hour, what time will it be.
Reading/Writing
- At night, read two stories and have your child tell how the stories are alike and how are they different.
- Encourage your child to make predictions about the characters, setting, and details of a book by looking at the cover of the book or by looking at the pictures in the book.
- Talk about why some books have illustrations, while others have pictures.
- After reading a book, encourage your child to write a story using his or her opinions regarding the book. Then allow your child to read his or her story to you or to another love one.