April News

Dates to Remember

School-to-Home Connection

I enjoyed seeing everyone at our recent parent-teacher conferences and discussing all the wonderful progress your children have made in first grade!!

When reading with your child, talk about the characters. Who is their favorite? What did the character do? How was the character feeling? What did they say?

Ask your child to tell you what happened at the beginning of a story? at the middle? at the end?

Ask your child to count to 40. Pick 2 random numbers between 1 and 40 and ask them which is the larger number or the smaller number.

Talk about what, if anything, you do to recycle items in your home.

We will continue our Friday spelling tests this month. 

Classroom Update

Reading/Writing

We will be starting a new unit in Reading Workshop called Meeting Characters and Learning Lessons.  Students will learn how to talk, think and grow ideas about characters in a text by looking closely at what they do, say and feel.

In Writing Workshop, we will begin a unit on realistic fiction.  Students will learn how to write a story with a beginning, middle and end. Students will also learn how to think of a pretend character, imagine a place, and think of a realistic problem and solution for the characters in the stories they write.

Math

We will be working on Chapter 13: Addition and subtraction to 40.  We will then move on to Chapter 14:  Mental Math Strategies.  Students will use mental math strategies to solve more complex computational and real-world problems.

Spelling/Phonics

We will continue learning about long vowel families.  Students will also learn how to make words with final consonant blends (sp, st, nd, nk, mp) and will be introduced to past tense verbs and homonyms ( to, too, two; no, know).

Science/Social Studies

In Science, we will be starting a new unit called Waves All Around Us.  Students will engage in experiments and exploration of the phenomenon of sound waves created by vibrations.  This unit is also connected to the Engineering Design Task "Let's Drum."  In this task, students will design and build their own drums out of everyday materials and explain how they make sound.