First
Grade Newsletter
Dear
Parents,
Congratulations! Your first grader has made it through four
weeks of school. The children have been
working very hard not only at their lessons but also at adjusting to all the
new procedures. They should be very
tired at the end of the day because they have worked hard. We have been working on the life skills of
perseverance and friendship. This week
we are covering the life skill of organization.
Be sure to notice when your child is using any of these skills or not
using them, and point this out. Here’s
an update on what we will be involved in during the next couple of weeks.
Religion: Your child has been listening to stories from
the Bible. We are focusing on the
Creation story, Mary, and the Holy Family.
Math: In Unit 3, your
child has been using numbers for counting and measuring. Now, your child will
learn that numbers can be made from different combinations. For example, ten
can be made from four and six and also from seven and three. As we explore
numbers, your child will use connecting cubes and pennies to help solve
problems.
Provide practice at home by:
•Encouraging
your child to count and tally objects. Your child can tally road signs,
trees, or
houses on the street.
•Looking for quantities of ten as a whole and numbers
less than ten as parts of a whole. For example, there are ten bowling pins and
your child may only knock down four, or there are ten cars parked on the street
and three are red.
Your efforts at home will
strengthen your child’s understanding of the math concepts explored at school. You can
help your child by providing a box to store simple math materials, such as
coins and beans, to help solve problems.
*Your child will use pennies for a variety of
activities in this unit. If possible, please send
twenty-five pennies to add to our class bank.
In
Unit 4, your child will use knowledge of parts and wholes to make the
connection between
real-world situations and addition. This unit emphasizes writing addition
number sentences (e.g., 4 + 2 = 6) and developing everyday math language
associated with addition.
Children use several
strategies for solving addition problems. We emphasize one particular strategy,
called counting on. For example, if a child has thirteen beans and is given
three more, one strategy for finding the total number of beans is to count all
sixteen beans, starting from one. Counting on is a more mature strategy whereby
a child begins with thirteen and then counts on the three new beans (“13 . . .
14, 15, 16”).
Your child will also be introduced to a calculator.
The calculator will not be used to replace children’s command of the basic
facts or other ways of doing computation. It will be used as a tool that will enhance
and promote learning. If your child solves a problem at home using a
calculator, ask him or her to explain which keys were pressed.
You can help your child at
home by starting a coin jar. Simply stock a small jar with a few nickels and
about 20–30 pennies. At homework time during the year, ask your child to take a
few coins from the jar, name the coins, and count the total value.
Thank you. Your continued
efforts at home make a difference.
Phonics: We have covered the consonant sounds and spellings
for the letters m, t, h, p, c, and d. We will be studying s, b, r, f and g. Short vowels are introduced first, so short a has been our focus.
We will be introducing short i soon.
Continue the great work with the phonics notebooks. Please make sure numbers and letters are
written correctly. Remember we use
correct spelling in phonics, but we use best guess in most of our other
work. Please continue to ensure your
child uses personal best handwriting in their notebooks. They should also have a complete sentence,
including a capital letter and end mark.
The
children are excited about the stories that we have been working on each week. Their readers come home every Friday so they
can read their story three times for homework.
You may feel that your child has memorized the story and this is
probably true. After they have read a
page, be sure to go back and point to specific words to see if they can
identify them. It also helps to have
them point to the words as they read to help them focus on the text.
Word Wall Words:
Please listen and help your child with their word
wall words that he or she brings home to practice each week; these can be found in his or her
assignment notebook. Please review these
words and previous words nightly. If
your child has trouble with these words, it would be a good idea to make flash
cards.
Writer’s
Workshop: The children
have been working on writing sentences, using capital letters at the beginning
and end marks. A few of the children are beginning
the process of publishing. Be on the
lookout for these books to come home.
Dates
to Remember:
September
September 14 – Sock it to Poverty (jeans day)
September 16 – 9:00 Mass – Teacher Blessing
September
18 – School Pictures
September
20 and 27 – All School Mass (
September
28 –
Sincerely,
Kate
Stilley
Carmela
Guthrie
Kathleen
Barry