August 27th Class Pictures: St. John Photography will be taking our class and individual student pictures on the 27th. Make sure to dress your child in what you want them to be wearing in their pictures.
August 29th 6:00-7:30 PM Curriculum Night: Note the time change! Due to parent and staff feedback over the years, they have reduced curriculum night to two sessions.
6:00-6:40 PM
6:50-7:30 PM
Please, please make every effort to attend one of these two sessions. I will discuss the first grade curriculum, expectations of students in the classroom, our field trips and performances, our first grade word study program, student/parent/teacher communication, and much more! If you cannot attend, please let me know and I will send home the information packet from the event.August 30th 9:00 AM Parent Volunteer Training: This will be held in the elementary music room.
September 3rd, 10th, 11th, 19th: No school
September 18th 8:30 AM-1:00 PM Walking Tour of Davidson: We are so excited to still get to go on this field trip! Because it was rained out last spring, we decided the kids should still have this amazing opportunity to go explore Davidson and meet our community helpers. Community helpers, cardinal directions, and maps are all a big part of our social studies curriculum. We will need parent chaperones to walk with us so put this date on your calendar if you are interested. More details to come!
October 18th CSD Kickball Festival: This event is for the whole family! Be sure to mark your calendars.
October 19th Fairy Tale Ball 8:30-10:30 AM: The kids are all SO excited for this event! We plan and throw a Fairy Tale Ball for all first graders to attend. Students dress up as their favorite fairy tale character and they rotate through different stations/activities over the course of two hours. Parents are welcome to come and watch the very beginning of the ball when the students will do a group dance. This portion will last about 10 minutes. We will also need parent volunteers to help run the stations. More details to come but mark this date on your calendar. You won't want to miss it!
***Parent volunteers will start the week of Labor Day. We have changed our park time this year to Thursdays from 1:00-2:00 PM.
Math:
We began our new first grade math curriculum this week that was constructed by the NC Department of Education. I am very impressed so far with it! The activity that the students completed this week required them to work in pairs and it worked on the skills of one-to-one correspondence, estimating, using 10 frames to organize and count cubes, figuring out how many more to make 20, and recording their findings on a chart. The students began by choosing a brown paper bag with a letter written on it. They had to estimate how many cubes they thought were in the bag and then take the cubes out and actually count them. They placed them on the ten frames as they counted to work on their visualization and counting on. Lastly, they had to figure out how many more cubes they would need to make 20. This was a challenging task because there were 4 steps they had to complete for each bag and they also had to record all of it on their chart. They were doing very well by the fourth day of working on it!
Literacy:
We continued to set up our Daily 5 time this week by practicing our "Read to Self" time. We began last week with only 3 minutes of "Read to Self" and we have worked up to 12 minutes! This is great because in order to add time, all students have to be focused with their reading and without distraction. Next week I will introduce the second portion of the Daily 5 which is "Read to Someone." We will build each week until I have introduced all 5 of the elements which include:1. Read to Self
2. Read to Someone
3. Listen to Reading
4. Work on Writing
5. Work Work
While students independently work at these stations, I am able to call them over to work in small groups on handwriting, word sorts, and guided reading. We also learned how to write on our green line paper this week and the students were VERY excited. You should have seen this work come home in your child's folder. I will explain all of this to you at curriculum night because this will lead into our word study program.
Thematic:
This week we kicked off our fairy tale unit by studying the elements of a fairy tale such as magic, good vs. evil, castles, and forests, happy endings, and "Once upon a time." We began with the story of Cinderella. We read many different versions of the story and compared and contrasted them. Students rotated through four centers this week that worked on different skills in each.1. Students created an art project and wrote what they would wish for if they had a fairy godmother.
2. Students used pattern blocks to build their own castle and then stencils to recreate the castle on paper. They had to record how many of each shape.
3. Students learned about the cardinal directions (north, south, east, west) and had to draw different parts of the fairy kingdom using the compass.
4. Students colored and created their own props, characters, and scenery in order to retell the story of Cinderella. I encouraged them all to come home and act out the story for you with their items.
Have a great weekend!
Love,
Mrs. James
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