Newsletter

October 1, 2008

Dear Families,

It was so nice to see so many of you at Parent Information Night. I hope you found the night informative and had many of your questions or concerns answered. If you were unable to attend and have not yet signed up for a Parent/Teacher conference please email me and we will set up a time. The dates for the conferences are Thursday, November 20^th and Tuesday, December 2^nd. First grade will have a half day on both of those dates and conferences will begin at 12:30. Also, please return the “You're the Expert” forms that were passed out that night. I find them very informative and feel they provide an opportunity for you to let me know of any concerns you may have.

The children have adjusted nicely to the longer day and very busy routine. I want to remind you again that our class schedule has changed since the beginning of the year. We now have lunch at 11:15 and recess at 11:45. Because we have an earlier lunch the children will now have their snack in the afternoon. Please make sure your child has an adequate breakfast each day before school.

Homework will be sent home in first grade but not consistently every night so please check you child's home/school folder every day. I do appreciate it when the homework comes back to school soon after it has been given out.

Poem Notebooks have been going home on Fridays. The children are very excited to share the poems/songs that they have learned in school with someone at home. Please sign and return these to class on Mondays.

Booktime, which is very similar to the kindergarten Read At Home program will be starting shortly. Remember these books are suppose to be books at your child's Independent Reading level. They are not meant to be challenging but more as a confidence booster and another way of encouraging reading at home for children. A letter will accompany the first set of books.

Academically the children have been working very hard in class. They have been moving through both the Math and Literacy Centers by using our class workboard. The experience that they had in kindergarten with the workboard has helped make first grade routines move along very smoothly.

In Math the children are almost finished with Unit 3 which focuses on combining numbers. Our math program, which is called Investigations, provides many opportunities for the children to learn a skill and then continue practicing that skill in a fun and non threating way. A lot of our math centers are games that children play with a partner in class and then bring home the instructions to play with someone at home. I hope you and your child are enjoying these simple games at home. We have also been working on solving story problems during math time.

During our Literacy time we have been working on beginning and ending sounds, the concept of a vowel, the short a sound and the word families at, ap, an, and am. We have also been working with some of our high frequency words. The children were introduced to the game Build, Mix Fix at the ABC center and have been consistently playing it for the past two weeks with the words of the week. In October they will be introduced to the game Look, Say, Cover, Write, Check which will also be set up at the ABC center during Literacy time. They continue to write in their Weekend Journals and will often have some sort of writing prompt at the writing center. We opened the listening center with a story on Johnny Appleseed last week as well as our computer center with the game Memory. At the art center the children already started working on a special project that will come home closer to the winter holidays.

Writer's Workshop continues to thrive in our class. The children are doing a fantastic job at doing their best guess spelling and adding details to both their pictures and stories. At the end of our Launching Unit in Writer's Workshop we will have an Author's Celebration. I will be sending home a paper/papers for you to help your child fill out and then send back into class that has to do with topics that would interest your child to write about during Writer's Workshop throughout the year. I thank you in advance for your help.

In Social Studies we have been talking about showing respect to each other and our American Flag. We attended a Get Along Gathering on Friday where the theme was Respect. Each month there will be a school wide assembly that will cover many important values that we try to teach the children. Every assembly ends with a skit where two characters, Duck and Moose (Mrs. Groden and Mr. Grace), reinforce the particular value being taught that month. The children love Duck and Moose and find them quite comical.

Our field trip to Honey Pot Hill Orchard related to the science unit on organisms which will be taught a bit later in the year. I would like to thank Mrs. Farrell and Mrs. Musto for helping us out on the trip.

During the month of September we celebrated Zoe and Juliana's birthdays. They both came into school with a teeshirt that they had decorated at home and all the children in the class signed it. Happy Birthday Zoe and Juliana!

I hope you find this newsletter informative and something that can become a topic of conversation with your child at home. I hope my next newsletter is a little bit shorter than this one!

Have a great weekend.

Paula Grace

REMINDERS

No school on Thursday, October 9^th and Monday, October 13^th and a half day on Wednesday, October 29^th.

School Pictures will be Tuesday, October 7^th.

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