Thursday, August 22, 2013

Week of Aug. 20

Upcoming Events:
*Aug. 30 1 hr. Early Out
*Sept. 2 Labor Day, No School
Notes:
*Please remember to call the school or send a note to me if your child’s plan after school changes.
*Please make sure to read and sign your child’s planner each night.
*We are doing a great job of logging minutes in the back of our planners.
*Books that your child will bring home on their reading level are called Hawk Books.  In the past they were called AR books.  With our new reading challenge we are focusing on reading instead of taking lots of AR comprehension tests.  Students are allowed to get a new book each day if their reading log is signed by a parent.
*We encourage all of you to drop your child at the front door instead of walking them to into their classrooms.
Things to Work on:
*Please review: having your child write their name with lowercase letters.
*Letter sounds
What we have been up to:
Reading: This week we read the book The Night Before First Grade and discussed how first grade is different than kindergarten.  We have also spent time reading poems that we will read all year long.  We have taken time to review writing our alphabet letters uppercase and lowercase.  We have also started journaling about topics of our choice.  I have already read many great stories about summer vacation.  This week we also had time to cut apart the poem: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star and glue it back together from memory.
Math:  In math we have been doing beginning of the year assessments.  We have completed our number writing as high as we can go.  We have also started our addition story problem assessment.  We have reviewed the numbers 0, 1, and 2.

Social Studies: We made a list of rules we have in school.  We then narrowed our rules down to five and were able to illustrate them.  I will bind the rules and illustrations into a book that students can read all year long.

Tuesday, August 20, 2013

Welcome Back

Today was our first day back to school for the 2013/2014 school year.  We had a terrific day!  Today was the beginning of our school wide reading challenge.  Please check the E-Hawk website to see our video that the teachers created.  Each night that the students read parents need to record how many minutes they read and sign in their planners.  Today we also read a poem about being back to school.  We were able to check out books today.  Each Tuesday students will have library time to check out their fun to read books.  I am excited for this school year!