News From Our Classroom

      Hello.  I hope your extra-long weekend was pleasurable,  and that you were able to stay Ice-Free and warm.  It is amazing how much snow disappeared at my house!  Now I have room for more snow.  It sounds as though we have more "weather" coming on Tuesday night/ Wednesday.  If we do not have any school on Wednesday due to a "snow event", our Math NWEA will have to be rescheduled as soon as possible.  In addition, we will have to again "carry" our sight words and fluency sentences tests over from THIS Friday to next week (Friday), as we did last week.  Also, realize NOW that we WILL have skiing this Thursday, unless we have a "Snow Day" on Thursday.   Please make sure your child has what he or she needs to be outside for the afternoon on Thursday.  We will leave school at 12:30 and we will leave the mountain at 3:30.  The buses will have already left for the day, so arrangements will need to be made to get your child home to you.  Children not picked up at school by 3:45pm will be sent to MKA, and their families will be billed for their child's time there.
      As promised, we began working with vowel teams and "magic e" words last week.  I have been asking your child, before decoding an unknown word, to look at how many vowels the word contains and where they are located within the word.  Generally, a word that is of the CONSONANT-VOWEL-CONSONANT pattern has a short vowel sound.  A word that is short (three letters or less) and ENDS in a vowel often has a long vowel sound.  And, when a word has TWO VOWELS that are side by side or separated by only one consonant,  the first vowel has the long sound, and the second vowel is silent.  Of course, there are vowel combinations in which the sounds are unique to that combinations of letters (ou, ow, aw, au, ew, oo), but we will work with those after we display skill with the typical long vowel sounds. If the children can learn to look at, count, and think about what the vowels in the word are doing, they can decode many first and second grade words.   It's important for the kids to learn these "rules" because whatever we are learning for reading can also be applied to spelling.  Next week will be the first week that your child has spelling words to learn.  Last week, we took a pre-assessment of the 35 Sitton words your child must know by the end of first grade.  In a few weeks, progress report "cards" will be coming home to you, and one of the things I will be reporting on will be the words your child does not yet know how to spell out of that list of 35 Sitton words.  Your child's spelling words will be unique to him or her each week based on this pre-assessment and on words he/ she misspells during daily work.  Once we have mastered the 35 Sitton First Grade words, we will begin to work on the remaining 65 Fry First Grade words.
     We started working with money in earnest this past week, and I was surprised to find out how much the kids really did not know about money.  Most kids had trouble adding coins under 50c  (which is common for first graders), but many even had a difficult time ASSOCIATING the correct name and value to the individual US coins, which is something they generally learn in Kindergarten. I will be sending you a copy of the screening on money that I did last Friday, so you will know exactly what your child does and doesn't know about money.   By the end of 1st grade, your child needs to be able to identify the name and value of all US coins (front and back), and needs to be able to add coin values beyond 50c, but under $1.00.  We continue to work on subtraction, time to the hour and the half hour, and the meaning of each of the digits in a multi-digit number.
      Mrs. Raymond is interested in creating a special "reading igloo" for the children to use.  So, she is asking families to clean out and save their "gallon milk jugs" AND lids, and have the children  bring them into school. It should be an adventure, anyway!
        Okay, so if we have school each remaining day this week,  we will do our NWEA Math test Wednesday morning from  9:20 to 10:20.  We will have skiing Thursday afternoon from 12:30 - 3:30, and we will do "share" on Friday.   That's all for this week.  I'll be in touch again next week.