First Grade News!

Greetings Families!

I am excited to share our second newsletter of the year! This bi-weekly publication will be a key resource for staying connected and informed about our classroom. Thank you for checking, emptying, and returning Thursday Folders in their backpacks! When I take a grade on an assignment, or on an assessment, I will use the following grading scale to inform you of your child's progress towards Colorado State Standards. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out!

• + = Meets
• ✔️ = Making Progress
• ➖ = Not Making Adequate Progress

We have spent the last week focusing on closed syllable words with the short o sound. We even had some adorable "word detectives" working in disguise! 🥸 Every Friday students will be progress monitored on the skills we have covered that week. Progress monitoring includes skill words, heart words, and a dictated sentence containing both. You will receive their first progress check in next week's Thursday Folder. Current heart words are: the, said, of, see, to, he, be, me and from. These are words that that students should be able to read and spell quickly. Next week we are reviewing words with the short u sound and FLSZ (floss rule) words. Examples of these types of words are: pass, fill, buzz, and cliff. The floss rule is only used after a short vowel sound.

We are currently working our way through Topic 1. This week have continued exploring addition and practiced writing equations with both addends unknown. Students started with a "whole" number and broke it into two separate "parts". They discovered that addition equations can be written in two different ways: 5+2=7 or 7=5+2. Next week, we will continue our journey with Math Topic 1 by diving into subtraction and comparison! We’ll cover:

• Take From (Subtraction): For example, "You had 7 cookies and ate some, now you have 4. How many did you eat?"

• Comparing Situations: Understanding which quantities are more or less.

• Change Unknown: For example, "You had some pencils, gave away 3, and now have 5. How many did you start with?"

These concepts will help students see math in everyday situations and build their problem-solving skills.

Our sentence detectives have been hard at work discovering the missing "piece" to a sentence (subject, predicate). They worked on unscrambling a mixed up sentence and completing a sentence with a missing part. We are continuing to focus on always starting our sentences with a capital letter and ending them with appropriate punctuation. We will continue to work on our grammar skills while learning how to write an informative writing piece.

During Reader's Workshop we are continuing to work on listening comprehension strategies such as: identifying sequence of events, sorting words into categories and comparing and contrasting two pieces of informational text.

The iReady Fall Diagnostic Assessments are almost complete in both reading and math. I will be sending home the results as soon as everyone is done. These scores, along with other classroom assessments, will help me tailor instruction to meet each student’s individual needs in reading and math. We’ll also be discussing these results during our Fall parent-teacher conferences.