Thursday, September 20, 2012

Hello!
DAILY REMINDERS:

• Homework tonight:  Study spelling words for the test tomorrow (we, it, help, down, away), and READ. 
• Weekly Reading Record due tomorrow.  I sent next week's WRR home today.  It should be on the school side of your first grader's folder.
• Library tomorrow.

In first grade today:

• we read When This Box Is Full and then pulled different items out of a box and told what month they go with (red heart = February).
• we read the book Jan Can!  We discussed the short a  and -an word family words.  After that we sorted -an, -at, -ad, and -ap word family words together on our big pocket chart.
• we learned about a new type of pattern book.  We read Polar Bear, Polar Bear What Do You Hear? and learned that it is a question/answer pattern book.  I modeled how to write a question/answer book, and your first grader will begin writing their own question/answer book on Monday.  We also talked about the different resources hanging in our classroom to help us become better readers and writers.
• practiced most of our Daily 5 centers:  Read to Self, Word Work, and Work on Writing.  Our Word Work activity involved writing each spelling word and then writing the number of vowels, consonants, and syllables each word has.
• we learned how to answer a math story by finding the question in the story, the information we need in the story, and then drawing a picture to help us find the answer to the question. 
• we started working on a cloud project.  We will make the 3 different types of clouds using cotton balls tomorrow or Monday.

We have a special visitor coming to first grade tomorrow.  Officer Ed from the Crestwood Police Department is coming for the next five weeks to do the DARE safety program with our students.  We look forward to learning many things from him!