Welcome to First Grade. I had a wonderful time at Back to School Night seeing everyone. I would be happy to fill you in on any questions you may have.
The Homework Calendar will begin on Tuesday night, and will be sent home with the students. Coach Wolfrath is our P.E. coach everyday for first trimester. He will have his blog up and running shortly. I will link it to my blog.
Please send to school one sock to be used as an eraser on chalkboards. This will help us to practice letter strokes for Handwriting Without Tears.
I am sending home their spelling practice words. These words are review words from the Kindergarten List, learned last year. All of the students read them fine, but missed some of the spelling. I have added the Kindergarten words to their Word Card ring for added practice. The Word Card ring will be sent home each Monday and returned each Thursday. Please use them as flash cards, and make sure they can spell the words as well. Please refer to the information letter for more ideas on how to help your child learn them.
I am in the middle of launching our reading and writing workshop. My focus is to approach reading and writing with an eager attitude. I want to build their confidence, and have them think of themselves as a good readers and writers. I am building on what they learned last year, and scaffolding skills to help them succeed. We purchased a new Word Work program, Fountas and Pinnel. We will be working on high frequency words as well as phonemic awareness, and learning spelling rules through word families.
We have begun our daily class meetings and our working on our classroom as a community, reading many stories.