Busy! Busy! Busy!
The first graders have been super busy this week! In reading we have been focusing on the "heart" words put, push, was, of, you, for, or, many, one, and find. Our Structured Literacy block consists of manipulating sounds, spelling words, figuring our rhyming words, alliteration skills (ex: Happy hippos hopped happily), decoding passages, and basically building solid foundational reading skills. In our reading portion of the day we have been learning between 10-15 new vocabulary words per week. We also have Start Right Readers (decodables readers), myBook stories, as well as the Rigby Library books. The Rigby Library books allows each child to read books at his / her own level. The myBook stories focus heavily on teaching the students key elements, such as author's purpose, story structure, characters and setting, and making inferences, just to name a few. We use our white boards a lot throughout the day instead of writing on workbook pages. I also "jump start" the students by specifically teaching more letter clusters and their sounds that are being used in words throughout their readers so that they can ultimately apply their knowledge to decode unknown words.
In grammar they have learned what a noun is and they are currently learning about recognizing action words. I do complement my instruction with many short YouTube videos to help solidify the concepts.
Our Into Reading program also includes Amira, which is an interactive program on their I-pads. They are able to talk into their microphones and listen and respond with the character. This program is designed to help students learn to read more fluently by correcting any mispronunciation of words.
In math we have learned how to solve story problems that use the words "How many more" or "How many fewer." We drew multiple ways to show the problem and the children then chose which one worked for them the best. The students are also working on beginning skills of adding by counting on. Telling time to the hour has been taught in our morning corner session as well as how to represent numbers using tens and ones blocks.
In Social Studies the first graders learned about the different kinds of communities that they were a part of.
In writing they listened to a book that taught them that writers can write about anything in their day. We are currently writing a story about their favorite part of their summer vacation. These pictures depict how hard your children work daily!
As you can see, we have been Busy, Busy, Busy!!!