Reading
- In Readers Workshop this week we will begin our book shopping schedule in class. This gives students the opportunity to choose on level books and choice books for their own book bag. They read these books all week during independent reading time.
- We will discuss the difference between "real" reading and "fake" reading. We want to be REAL readers all the time when we read on our own!
- Next we will learn that readers set goals for themselves to become stronger readers. We will use the expectations from our real reading anchor chart to set our goals.
- We will learn how to practice reading smoothly instead of sounding like a robot as we read! We will learn that we can do this by "scooping up" a group of words at a time instead of just one word.
- There will be a high frequency grade this week on Sept. 21st. over half the sight words. Look for the small pink paper in your child's binder that show the words we will be assessing.
Language Arts
- In Writers Workshop, we will start off by discussing all the good things we already know about writing, then make new goals for writing this year.
- We will then learn all about writing a small moment or capturing only a small portion of an event and writing about it across several pages.We will be using the visual of a watermelon and only writing about "one seed" not the whole watermelon. We will be using the term “zooming in” to help them remember to focus on a piece of a story, rather than writing a list of events.
- We we also learn about "bringing our stories to life" by making our characters "move" and "talk" in our writing.
Word Study
- This week, we will be introducing and working with the -at/-an word families and will be exploring many different words that contain these word families.
- We will discuss Word Study in more depth at our Parent Orientation as well.
- You will see a GREEN WORD STUDY BOOKLET in the back of your child's binder at the end of this week. Just a reminder that this booklet stays in their binder. It should never stay at home. ALSO, your child should NOT work ahead on this booklet at home. We will work through it together at school, and then they can use it as a study tool at home. Please make sure they DO NOT work ahead in it at home. Thank you for your help with this!
Handwriting
- The language arts homework this week will be in the handwriting booklet. We will be grading letters Q-Z this week. Please only complete the letters we do in class each night for homework. Correct handwriting and letter formation is a crucial skill our students must learn at this age. We will be teaching the students how to write and form the letters correctly here at school. Their homework will be to complete the rest of the assigned letter or letters for that day. This will be counted as a homework grade. We will be checking for correct letter formation, neatness, and completion on time. Please work with your child on doing their best neat work on the handwriting pages.
- The booklet will be in your child’s binder every day. Please complete the assigned letters for the day and bring it back in the binder the next day. Your child’s teacher will be checking for homework completion every morning.
- Homework is a big part of first grade. It is very important that the students practice and reinforce the skills that they learn at school. We will normally send home one yellow language arts paper home every Monday and it will be due that Thursday. We will talk more about this during our parent orientation meeting on September 19th.