What's the Buzz in
Miss Glath's First Grade Class?
*Newletters are sent home every Friday!  Please look for this in your child's folder.

Newsletter for the week of...

May 13th- May 17th (below)

Reading & Writing

In our ELA mini-lessons this week, students have continued to work on identifying character traits of the characters in the texts we have been reading.  The texts we have read include A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon (continued from last week), Giraffe’s Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae and Stand Tall Molly Lou Melon by Patty Lovell.  Students came up with many traits for these characters including unique, brave, persistent (some support on this one), friendly, caring, kind, clumsy, etc.  This has been a great way to build our vocabulary!  We have been discussing the difference between character traits and feelings as this can be a difficult concept to understand.  When reading at home, ask your child “how would you describe this character?” and “what makes you think the character is brave, etc…” (they should be encouraged to go back into the text to look for evidence to support their answer).

The word patterns that we practiced this week included “ash” and “uck.”  Each week, students say how much they love the poems that incorporate these word family words.  We have continued to practice the skill of visualizing (painting a picture in our mind) while reading the poems the first day and then working on fluency building and reading the word family words within context on the second day.

In Writer’s Workshop this week, students began to prepare for their persuasive writing pieces.  We read a realistic fiction text, I Wanna Iguana by Karen Orloff, about a little boy who tries to convince his mom to get him an iguana.  Students are in the brainstorming process in writing a letter to Dr. Henkel about something that they would like for our school.  Students discussed the difference between realistic and unrealistic wants for our school and came up with a long list of things including this like iPads and/or Nooks!

 Math

This week in math, students have been reviewing material from the entire school year!  It can be challenging to mix all these concepts together and think about how to solve each problem but they have been working so diligently with this.  Thank you for all of the extra practice at home with homework and facts!  They took a cumulative assessment on Friday (May 17^th) covering first grade math curriculum. 

As the school year is starting to wind down, please continue to practice addition and subtraction math facts within 10.  Also, encouraging your child to answer word problems that include both addition and subtraction and any other concepts from the school year would be great!  Any math connection to the real world is very helpful and makes sense!