Resources

This week, we will continue the third unit of study in Arts and Letters to answer the question: "How is the wind powerful?"  We will be asking students to think about wind and weather throughout this unit.  Through the different books that we read, students will learn facts about wind and weather and will generate a paragraph with evidence from the texts we read.

Additionally, we will be working on developing good habits of reading.  We will learn how to pick good books, read both the words and the pictures as we read, and to find the title and author of a given book.  These tools will be important as we dive into the curriculum in a few weeks!

Students will learn more about concepts of print, and how literature can help us learn about the world around us.  Our first unit taught the students to see themselves as readers, as they explored the library, and determined goals for themselves as readers.  Our next unit gave the students the opportunity to dive more deeply into texts to begin reading facts and identifying main ideas and key details.  Our new unit will put everything together as students begin to generate paragraphs to write about what they are learning.

The writing tasks in this unit give the students the opportunity to write about the information they are learning as they read!  We will explore a variety of texts and use what we know about nonfiction texts to write evidence statements.

In Fundations, the students will begin Unit 10 on closed syllables with 5 sounds, suffixes, and the inflected endings -ed and -ing.  A closed syllable is a word that has one vowel, which makes the short sound, which is closed in by one or more consonants.  Students will learn that all of the words that they have learned so far in first grade are closed syllables, but we will learn to mark up this syllable type using a breve and underlining the entire syllable. We will also introduce students to all vowel teams,  with the expectation that they can recognize vowel teams in words, and perhaps sound them out, but there is no expectation that the students can spell words with vowel teams at this point.

We will use some hands-on activities to build words on our magnet boards and we will use magnetic chips, and we will use some whole body word building to learn about new trick words.  These words are not phonetic and need to be learned by heart.  We will concentrate on the heart part of the word and use these words to fill our sound wall.

The Fundations Unit packets that comes home with the students at the beginning of each chapter has some helpful ideas for word work and trick words at home.  While the activities are completely optional, they provide great ideas for activities to support phonics at home.

In Writing, our students have published their first piece of writing, their Directed Drawing piece.  The students drew a picture of something they were familiar with and used labels in their pictures.  They then wrote complete sentences to describe what is going on in each picture, using capitalization and punctuation like First Grade Writers.  

This week's writing will correspond with our Arts and Letters lessons.  Students will use their journals to write about what they have learned and to make connections to texts and art.  Each activity builds their strength and skills as a writer and prepares them for an end of module task in a few months.  Students will be learning about main idea and key details and will be using their journals to write in complete sentences about what they notice in our reading lessons.

Be on the lookout in our hallway if you are visiting in the coming weeks for examples of their hard work!