Happy Monday everyone!
The students are beginning to understand and follow the new rules and routines of grade one. With every new class, the students need to learn what the expectations are of the classroom community. This week we focused again on our rules and routines, I have also started assessing students. Therefore, we have been reviewing letter and number formation. I have also assessed some students on their reading level. In grade one, we are not only looking at a student's fluency (the ability to read the words on the page), but also his/her comprehensions skills, such as retelling and making connections. That is, we are teaching students to read for meaning and to think about what they are reading.
This week, we started our Social Studies unit on Changing Roles and Responsibilities. This is a great opportunity to discuss, at home, the different roles each family member has and their responsibilities. We have been discussing the importance of rules and what happens when rules are broken. In math, we have been looking at numbers from 1 to 20. We are looking at recognition, the ability to print, and one to one correspondence. We have also reviewed counting by fives and tens to one hundred. Ask your child to count by tens with you the way he or she does in class. We have also started our Printing Program. Printing not only provides fine motor practice, but it also supports their letter-sound development along with building stamina to sit and work. It is important that students learn "stamina" to ensure they are able to pay attention, focus and learn. I have also introduced the different levels assessing so help with their stamina. We discussed how to create a WOW picture. Ask your child how to get a level 3 picture.
