Ms. Haselhorst's 1st Grade

Hello 114 families! The star of this newsletter is the wonderful Halloween pics. We had an absolute blast painting pumpkins! Check out what else we have been up to below.

• No school 11/2/26 - Parent Teacher Conferences --> please send me a time between 12pm and 6pm that works for you!
• No School 11/2/26- Election Day
• No School 11/11/26- Veterans Day
• FALL BREAK 11/23-11/29 Students return on 11/30
• Graded work will now be sent home with students every two weeks. Please check your students backpack on this day to monitor their learning.
• School starts at 8:30. We get right into learning how to read in the first hour of the school day. It is super important that your student is on time or they will be missing out on vital reading instruction.
• HOMEWORK: Homework packets will be given out every Monday for the week. Homework packets are due the following Monday. These packets will live in your child's take home folder. Homework is given to practice skills that will help us be successful.
• Our Gym Days are Monday and Thursday.

We would love to have parent chaperones come along on our future field trips. Since it can take some time to get approved, I wanted to share the process as you will need to get CPS APPROVED to be a chaperone.

1. Click on this link that takes you to the application and select "new volunteer"
2. Fill out your information and check the box that says "I am interested in volunteering in... chaperone"
3. Once you submit your application CPS will do a soft background check. You will receive an email in 2-5 days regarding your approval.
4. Once you are approved, please forward the email to me along with a photo of your ID. I need this information so I can then forward it to Ms. Snyder in the main office for our records.
5. Then you are cleared to come along with us on our field trips. Yay!

PHONICS:

Students are learning that letters say certain sounds. We call this the reading "code". It is crucial to their reading progress that students be able to identify the sounds that letters make. This is the first step in learning how to read. Now, we're expanding on what we know and learning to blend and segment house sounds, sister sounds, double letter sounds, and up to 4 sounds in a word.

Our biggest goal for students in 1st grade is to LEARN HOW TO READ. This is a huge goal because it requires a lot of practice, patience, and attention. Please read with your child as many nights a week as possible so that you can also keep track of the progress they are making with their decoding (reading) skills. If you need more resources or have any questions please reach out. I cannot stress enough how important reading at home is!

ELA:

We are currently finishing up our first unit of the year where we investigted what it meand to work together and create a strong community. Next, we will be reading a variety of informational text to answer the question "How and why do animals and plants protect themselves?" .

This unit is so much fun because nature has so many amazing things to show us and lessons to teach! Important themes for our upcoming unit include:

• Asking and answering questions within a text
• Using text features to find informtion
• Identifying key details
• Finding the main topic
• Making connections within a text
• Finding the meaning of unknown words

WRITING

Writing is an area where 1st graders grow a ton! It's amazing to see the progress some students have already made in being able to write complete sentences. We will be writing personal narratives that focus on a small, memorable moment in our lives. Throughout the narrative process, we will be focusing on:

• Turning ideas into complete thoughts or sentences
• Invented spelling- when we are not sure how to spell a word we can sound it out!
• Using punctuation correctly
• Finger space
• Making sure our writing makes sense

I include writing activities in homework packets for practice AND so you can see where your student is at with their writing abilities. I big part of writing is also problem solving. If students do not know exactly how to spell a word, they should think about the sounds they hear in that word and then the letters that say that sound.

Students have been given a variety of strategies to solve subtraction and addition word problems. These include manipulatives (like blocks or counters), fingers, number paths, drawings, and number bonds or partner pairs. We are beginning to learn and experience how addition and subtraction are related to one another. Knowing this can help us find missing parts in a problem and write number sentences to show our work.

This is an imporant time to support your student as it can be a challenging transition into story problems and thinkin abstractly about things we cannot see. Homework packets are a great time to sit down with your student and monitor their learning. Are they fluently adding and subtracting? Are they using strategies instead of guessing? Are they checking their work? If you would like more practice pages for your student please let me know. I am happy to support!