Oh, Parents, you rock! Thank you so-o-o-o much for sending in Halloween candy for "trick-or-treating" at CPS on Halloween night. Last week, we collected 6 pounds of candy, and that was mostly stuff I brought in, as you had JUST found out about the collection. This week, however, we brought in a whopping 35 pounds of candy!!!! Thank you so much! We will continue to collect donations until Friday 10/28, if any of you who haven't contributed would like to do so. The dollar store does have small bags of candy, too, for a buck, if you are interested. Thank you, too, to the KIDS and families sending money in for the polio collection. That money is being collected by the Rotary on October 24th. So far, four of our students have participated.
Okay, so now we have to talk about our Halloween party. It will be on October 31st (duh). The only part of that day NOT already spoken for is from 8:45 - 9:20, and 12:20 - 1:00pm. Neither one of those times seems like a terrific time to have a party (right after breakfast, or right after lunch!!!!). So I would like to suggest that we have finger food out on tables from 12:20 - 1:00pm that we can quickly stash in my little frig and pull out again when we return from our "parade" around town (when the kids are actually hungry, but also getting ready to leave). Could I interest any of you in sending in some "finger" things for this cause--crackers, cheese, juice boxes, pretzels, veggie sticks and dip, fruit in bite sized pieces, cookies, dunkin' munchkins? I don't have a "room mom", so just send me a note telling me what you can help with, and we will be fine. We will share what we get, and not worry about the rest. Thanks once again!
I did need to tell you about a change that will be happening starting next week, at least for one of my reading groups. The "Blue" Group has managed to learn the 35 Sitton sight words that they MUST know for the end of first grade, so we will be starting to learn the remaining 65 words they are also supposed to learn. In the past, we have managed to work on 10 words a week, and that is what I would like to try again this year. As I said, only one group is ready to do the switch over to the Fry words starting today. The "Yellow" Group should be ready to try to do it on November 1st (there will NOT be any homework on Halloween!), and the "Red" Group may be ready by November 8th. We'll see if the kids can handle that many words a week--if it's too much, we will "roll it back" a little. As I said, most groups have been able to manage 10 words per week. I will also be sending home "fluency sentences", since building fluency is really emphasized on the school-wide reading tests (as of two years ago). A sheet of paper will come home on Monday with 12 simple sentences on it. Your child practices these 12 sentences (on the front and the back of the paper) in random order. By Friday, he or she should be able to fluently read the 12 sentences aloud to me without hesitation or stuttering. I will randomize the order of the sentences, so don't just have your child practice them one after the other, or he or she may APPEAR TO BE fluent, even when not. "Little readers" will still come home as usual.
You should have noticed by the papers coming home that I am giving you the rubrics by which your child's penmanship and writing will be evaluated by me. The rubrics will change over the course of the year (as your child becomes more capable at reading and writing), so you will always know HOW I feel your child is doing just by reading the rubric sheet. The overall grade/ score is in the upper right hand corner, and each subsection receives a grade of its own for each piece of writing or for each page of penmanship. I am already seeing big changes in how your child uses the writing lines on papers he or she is doing for me. That's good because at the beginning of the year, it didn't look like many of them even knew what the lines were there for. Please sit down with your child for a few minutes when you get the papers with these rubrics on them (yellow is penmanship, blue is writing) and go over why they received the score that they received. This helps them understand what they ARE doing right, what they are NOT doing correctly, and how they can improve in this area. In writing, we are still working at the sentence level because many of the children are struggling to form several complete sentences on the same topic. So, right now, I am focusing on writing a complete thought (somebody or something DOING SOMETHING), using a capital letter at the beginning of the sentence, and a punctuation mark at the end of the sentence. I want them to be really comfortable at writing a good basic sentence or two before we start working on increasing their writing stamina and descriptive capabilities.
As you can also tell from work coming home, we have been adding this week. The kids are getting practice with this skill by playing dice and dominoes games, and recording what is happening. They are adding without even knowing that they are adding. We are doing an addition word problem each day together as a class, and then we are breaking into smaller groups to do the computation practice, often in "game format". Your child has been introduced to "turn around" facts in an effort to help him/ her feel like they don't have to memorize quite so many addition facts. They are learning if you know that 1 + 4 = 5, you don't have to learn what 4 + 1 equals--you already know that those two numbers, when added together will make 5. We are also focusing on "ANY number plus zero equals the original number", and +1 means to go to the next number bigger. We are learning to "draw" representational pictures of math problems, as well. Finally, we have learned to show our addition equation on a numberline, with a big dot on the first number (say, 5, in the equation 5 + 2 = ?) and with the second number in the equation indicating how many JUMPS we have to make on the numberline (two hops on the line from 5). We circle where we land (7), and that is the answer to 5 + 2! These are all strategies you can use at home with your child, too.
We're coming along with our continents--we haven't done much with the oceans yet. Most of us know where North America, South America, Africa and Asia are. We're working on Europe, Australia, and remembering the name of Antarctica. Most of us do know the cardinal directions of N, S, E and W, and can even point to them in space. We also can find the month name, the days of the week, and the year on a calendar. Many of us can even show you what a week looks like!!! We can certainly sing you the names of the months with two different songs, and can sing you the names of the days of the week, as well. We will take a break from continents and oceans for this week so I an introduce the children to the first "system" in their human body--the skeletal system. One HAS to teach that system at Halloween time, doesn't one?! We'll go back to more work on maps after next week. Oh, there's SOOOO much to learn in first grade! And we're having fun doing it!
I think that's all for this newsletter. I'm off with my family to a "Harry Potter weekend" at a "haunted house" in Boston, MA!!! It should be fun.
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