News from Our Classroom

     Can you believe it--we're one week away from April vacation, and we had a one-hour delay due to snow on Thursday?!?!  Thank goodness it didn't need to be a snow day!   We are already going to go to school until June 19th--the snow day would have "bumped" us to June 23rd!  I understand why it happened--I live on top of a hill, and when I left for work, there were still a few places along my route that were a bit slippery.  Fortunately, the delay didn't change our day much.
      In Reading right now, we have been working as a whole group digraphs (sh-, ch-, th-, wh-, and ph-).  The children have built digraph "flowers" to hang on our bulletin board in the hallway.  For months, we have been working to remember that, unless it comes at the END of a word, a single vowel within a word GENERALLY makes the short vowel sound.  I have been asking the children to focus on noticing how many vowels are in a word before they try to decode it.  You should do the same thing at home.  Now, obviously, there are quite a few exceptions to this rule ( like -old, -ight, -ind), but it works for more words than it does not, and so is somewhat useful to kids learning to decode.  We have studied "silent e", and the "normal" sounds that vowel teams make ("when two vowels go awalkin', the first one does all the talking", ie: ai, ay, ee, ea, ie, oa, ue).   Now many of the kids are advanced enough phonetically to need to start working on those more unusual vowel teams that have their own unique sound (oo, oi, oy, ow, aw, au, al, ew) and the various r- controlled vowels.  These letter combinations will be our focus lessons over the next couple of weeks.  Some children need a review of consonant blends, too, so we will mix a little of that into our phonics work, as well.  Keep your child working on mastering those sight words!  The more they know their words by sight, the less they have to stop to "figure out" unfamiliar words!  In the comprehension area, we are working on "main idea" (locating the "main idea" sentence in a paragraph on a given topic).  Since this is a difficult concept for children struggling to read the paragraph, we have also been thinking about the main idea conveyed by pictures.  We have just recently been working on the idea of "cause" and "effect".  We have been using the read-aloud book Little House on the Prairie to learn about how the era of the pioneer is similar and very different from life today.  We have been discussing what we are exposed to in each day's reading, and have been making predictions of what might happen next, especially based on the upcoming chapters' titles.  I saw a lot of  "Little House" books go home after last week's library class, so I know the kids are "getting into" the book.  This coming Friday, we will take the last hour or so of school to watch one or "Little House" episodes from the tv series, "Little House on the Prairie".  The kids and I will be so excited that vacation is here that it will be difficult to focus on too much otherwise, and we can  make connections with reading AND work on Social Studies while having a good time, too.
      Speaking of good times--did your child tell you about learning fractions on Friday?  In First Grade, we need to cover reading, comprehending, and writing the fractions 1/2, 2/2, 1/3, 2/3, 3/3, 1/4, 2/4, 3/4, and 4/4 .  I have discovered, through YEARS of doing this, that the easiest way to teach basic fractions to children this age is through FOOD.  The first thing they need to understand about fractions is that a fraction represents "an equal part" of a whole.  Believe me, if you divide food for kids to share and you don't do it in equal parts, you hear about the "unfairness" of the division VERY quickly!  When "equal parts" is presented to them in this fashion, kids "get" the need for "equal parts' and remember it!  I cut a cookie into 1/2s, another into 1/3s, another into 1/4s, and another into 1/8s.  It didn't take them long to realize that the larger the denominator became, the smaller the piece of cookie became!  We did the same with candy bars.  Wow! Was Math class good on Friday!  This coming week, we will have a simple lesson on equivalent fractions (not a first grade concept, but really easy to teach and learn using apple slices)!  The children have now two new apps on their ipads to help them practice fractions: Kevin Bradford's First Grade Learning Games (fractions section) and Brian West's Pizza Fractions 1.  They should have the first grade fractions concepts mastered in no time!  We will be "juggling" fractions, time, money, 3D Geometry concepts and measurement for the remainder of the school year.  And, of course, we will continue to work on those computational skills each week.  I'd love to have the entire class able to pass their basic subtractions test by the end of the school year.
      In Language Arts, we are continuing the struggle to remember to apply those capitalization and punctuation rules whether we are writing sentences or paragraphs. The Daily Review and Editing work we started a month ago (where the kids get to play "teacher" and correct their own papers) is going a long way to helping them remember to apply these rules, and is also helping to correct any misconceptions they may have formed along the way.  Though the majority of the class can identify "nouns" and "verbs",  many of the children are thrown by "adjectives".  We will continue to work on these three parts of speech through the end of the year.  The children did very well learning compound words and contractions.  We will periodically review these two concepts, but will shift our focus after vacation onto synonyms, antonyms, and homophones.  We will continue to practice alphabetical order, especially when the first consonant is the same for several of the words to be alphabetized.
      In Science, we will be finishing with the muscular system of the human body this week.  When we return from vacation, we will do the circulatory system, the respiratory system,  the digestive system, and then the excretory system.  In late May, we will return to the life cycles to take a more in-depth look at plants.  Also in May, we will take that field trip to Auburn to see the Slim Goodbody show on the human body systems.  More details about this field trip will be sent home right after vacation.  The cost to your child will be $5.00.
       After finishing our study of Now and Then in Social Studies, we will return to our mapping unit to create our own maps of imaginary gardens we wish we had.  At that time, we will learn about "human features" on a map versus "physical features".  We will end our Social Studies program this year by working together to create a time line of all of the historical events we learned about this year.
        Well, I hope this brings you up-to-date on what we have been learning, and where we intend to go for the remainder of the school year.   Don't forget--this coming week is Spirit Week!  The schedule, once again, is: Monday--80s Day; Tuesday--Sports Day; Wednesday-- Wacky Wednesday (no make-up, please); Thursday--Beach Day (no bathing suits, please); Friday--Pajama Day! (and we are also celebrating "Little House" day). You will not hear from me again before vacation, so I wish you and your family a wonderful week off from school.  Let's hope the snow and the mud are gone by the time we return to school so we can go outside for recess without having to change into outside "gear".