Second Week, Here We Come!

Monday= D Tuesday= A Wednesday= B Thursday= C Friday= D Happy Sunday, families! I hope you made it through a VERY hot weekend with your family. Thank you to everyone who made it to Movie Night on Friday. It was one of the best turnouts ever. I peeked in a few times and saw lots of our class family snugged up and watching Epic. It was a wonderful time. We are set for a full week as we start to settle in to a more typical first grade routine. Last week was spent testing and reading with my kids one-on-one and this week we begin our reading curriculum. The kids will be getting their new text books tomorrow and we will kick our week off reviewing the short sound of /a/. This week brings with it our first SPELLING TEST! Tomorrow we will be having our fist PRACTICE test. Your child will bring their words home for the week on Monday and we will have our POST test on Friday. Our spelling words share the sound pattern that we focus on each week. We also will introduce new "have-to-know" words that will be found throughout our first grade texts. Finally, we introduce "fancy pants" words in which I try to encourage the kids to use in context in their daily vocabulary. For example, last week our word was "UNIQUE". Have you heard this one at home a lot? Be sure to check our blog page each week to know the have-to-know words as well as the fancy pants words and help your child read and use these words at home. In math we will continue to work on writing our numbers, as well as putting them in order to the number 30. Please practice with you child at home by asking them things such as: "What number comes after 22?" or "What number comes before 13?" Number fluency is a critical skill as we begin our first grade learning and asking these simple questions as you are driving in the car help connect the kids more to what they are doing in the classroom. We are also continuing our work with measurement. Using comparison words such as "bigger", "taller", "longer" and "smaller" we have been working at measuring with different units. In first grade we use things like unifix cubes and links to determine what is bigger, longer or smaller. Extra practice at home will help us strengthen these skills and gear us up for our first math quiz this week! Did your child bring home their PTO Cookie Packets last week? Sunflower PTO does absolutely incredible things for our kids and if you are able to help support them in this big fundraiser, we would all be so grateful. It's going to be super-duper hot again this week, so that means super worn out kids. Please continue to help your first grader do their best by allowing them plenty of sleep. If you haven't let me know about posting your child's picture to the web for our website, please send me a quick email and let me know. I am so anxious to share the darling photos of what your kids have been up to so far! Let me know if you need anything. Let's have a great last week of August!