Thursday January 7th, 2010!

Wow!! This has been a whirlwind of a week. WELCOME BACK AND HAPPY NEW YEAR! I just want to say thank you again for all of your generosity over the holiday. You are all such a blessing to me.

This week in first grade there has been lot's going on. Tuesday I attended a wonderful seminar with some other PJ teachers on guided reading. It was wonderful!! I look forward to implementing all the wonderful ideas that I learned. The students had a laugh as I told them that I was the student for the day... they always think that is funny. :)

This week in literacy we are learning all about the long /a/ay,ai sound. We are building words and sorting words. It is a lot of fun! Ask your child to point out words with this sound that have ay and ai (say, bay, rain, chain). You can do a ai, ay word search in the newspaper! This week is alllll about weather. "How many kinds of storms do you know about?" "What could you compare and contrast about the storms?" Wow! Tons of oral vocabulary. Speaking of... our oral vocabulary words this week that we are focusing on are conditions, forecast, extreme and predict. Our high frequency words are warm, sound, cold, know, great, their. Our reading strategy that we are focusing on this week is REREAD. This is a wonderful strategy. Going back and rereading when we come to an unknown text is a great way to check ourselves and ask the question, "Does this make sense?"
We are learning compound words this week. We are having a blast finding compound words. The kids learned that some words are made up of two smaller words. These words are called compound words. Some words we found are (mailbox, playmate, daytime, raindrop).

In grammar we are learning how to use the present- and past- tense forms of go and do correctly.

In vocabulary this week we are learning the words orbit and temperature. We show our understanding by writing the word, picture, sentence, and antonym and synonym of the words. We are really learning our vocabulary. :)

In religion we are identifying the Church's Celebrations. We are having many discussions about what the sacraments celebrate. We are really learning our sacraments.

In science we are learning about the planets of Mercury, Venus and Earth. The students have a great science book that we put together are collecting facts in. They will take this home when they are all done with this unit. Next week we have a special project planned with 7th grade. We are going to be doing a really fun planet assignment. We are planning a field trip for this 3rd quarter that has to do with the planets. It will be a blast. More info will come home in the near future.

This week in math we are learning how to follow a addition and subtraction rule. Add 4 or subtract 3. We even came up with some of our own. We are also representing equivalent forms of numbers to 12. Another objective is to create addition and subtraction situations and write corresponding number sentences. Woweeee... Lot's of math concepts.

Report cards came home today. Please return the white envelope with your child. I am very proud of our class. We are learning a lot and each and every student is a blessing. I talked to the students about the new expectations for 3rd quarter. I told the kids how I believe in them and know that they are ready for higher standards in this next quarter. I will be posting these new expectations in next week's homework note.

Have a wonderful day!!