Our first week of school got off to a wonderful start. Students participated in several team building activities to get to know each other including: creating a first grade puzzle together, sharing their "Me" bags and creating a name graph.

Language Arts:

This week students were reintroduced to the Open Court Reading program. We began our first unit, Look Who’s Reading by reviewing the letters A through J. As a class, we practiced listening for vowel and consonant sounds in words and for word parts. Students also clapped out the number of syllables in several different words. We read and responded to four different poems titled: "The Purple Cow," "Dawn," "Las Hormiguitas" and "If I Were a Mouse." Our favorite poem was "The Purple Cow". It was fun to visualize what one would look like! Our class also read a pre-decodable book titled, The Table.

Math:

In the mornings, students participated in a math meeting. The math meeting focused on the calendar, counting and keeping track of the number of days in school. During math on the first day of school, students wrote their name in a grid and compared it to their peers’ names. Students identified whose name was longest and shortest and placed all of the names in order on a chart from shortest to longest. Students also practiced counting to twenty, recognized a small number of items by sight, and reviewed reading and writing numerals.

Students read the Weekly Reader entitled, "Back to School." This was sent home on Wednesday with your child. As a class we read the articles and discussed school helpers (i.e. librarian, cafeteria staff and custodial staff).