Friday Flyer

 Dear Families,

          We are “Gearing up” for March is Reading Month!!

Book Bingo

          During March is reading month, the first graders will be playing Book Bingo on Fridays.  The purpose is to get more books in the hands and homes of all our first graders.  This will re-energize readers to read more often if they have more books, new books, and for some…just books in their home.  You can help support this by cleaning off your children’s book shelves at home and sending in any gently used books.  The books will be used as prizes during our bingo games.  Several years ago we did this and children were leaving school with arm loads of new books to read.  What a great experienceJ!!  Stay turned for more information on March is Reading Month activities we will be participating in as well.

Language Arts

       The past few weeks we have been working hard on preparing for our upcoming report cards/conferences.  The children have done very well with the assessments given thus far. J Next week, the children will be introduced to the strategy of “Asking questions before, during and after reading a story”.  I will model this for them and then they will be given the opportunity to practice the first part of writing down questions they have as they review the cover of the book.  This strategy helps readers to activate any schema they may have as well as do some predicting which helps the brain get ready for words they may see in the text. During Spelling, we began our unit on long vowels and words that contain the silent e at the end.  As a challenge, I even chose some words with blends at the beginning that also had the silent e…the children did awesome!!  Super spellers in the making!!

Math

This week we celebrated 100 days of school with lots of activities centering around the number 100!  We rotated through each of the first grade classrooms and did 100 second exercises, did estimation jar activities, read 100’s Day books, and much more!

In math workshop, we did Valentine’s Day review stations and brushed up on building numbers using base-10 blocks, deciding if two math sentences were equal among other review activities!  This week we focused on making 10 mentally when adding so we can do math in our minds (ex. Thinking of 9+5 as 9+1+4, which is actually 10+4).  Some students are still choosing to use math manipulatives or number grids to solve these problems and some students have figured out strategies to solve them mentally!    

                            Science

In science we are half-way through our “Sorting It Out” unit.  We have sorted objects using the properties rough and smooth, flexible and rigid, and we have begun experimenting sorting objects that are magnetic and not magnetic.  We went “fishing” in our classroom to see which items in our “pond” were attracted to our magnets.  We also came up with our own questions about magnets and performed experiments to answer our questions.

Social Studies

We watched a video clip, read non-fiction books, and even learned how to perform safe searches on the internet to learn about Valentine’s Day last week.  Ask your students about this holiday and what we learned about St. Valentine. J

Upcoming dates:

Friday, March 4- ½ day of school, 11:25 dismissal

Wednesday, March 9- Evening conferences

Thursday, March 10- Afternoon and Evening conferences

Thursday, March 10- ½ day of school, 11:25 dismissal

Friday, March 11- No School

Friday, March 25- Family Fun Night at the high school 5:30-8:30

Tuesday, March 29- Talent Show 1:30-2:30

Thanks for your continued support at home!

Mrs. Mason & Mrs. Putnam