Developing Readers, Writers, and Thinkers

Mrs. Walter

What We're Learning

 

Word Work:

Green:  slid  slip   sled  smell   swat  eat

Red:  gift  twist  nest  felt  must  were

Blue:  mint  side  smile  make  space  clash  know

 

Each week a sentence will be dictated to the students.  Each sentence must start with a capital letter and end with punctuation.

The sentence and the word work words must be written carefully.  First grade students are expected to make their letters correctly now and not add capital letters when it is not needed.

Class News

 

The first grade program will  be on Tuesday, February 7th at 6 pm.  Please have your child wear dark pants or jeans and a gray, black or white shirt.  No skirts please. The program is all about winter weather, snow, the polar regions, penguins and the water cycle.

I wanted to give you a list of the field trips that the first grade will be participating in this semester.

Feb. 10th Creative Discovery Museum  (will need parent volunteers)

March 1st  Suessical, Chattanooga Theater Center  (no volunteers needed)

March 28th or 29th  Challenger Center   (may need parent volunteers)

Spring Nature Walk  -  This is our annual Easter Egg Hunt!  We need lots of parent volunteers and a host home near school.  The plan is that we walk to a student's home and enjoy the day!  We hunt eggs, eat lunch, play games, then walk back to school.  It will be held the week before Spring Break.  If no one offers a home close to school, we can take up field trip fees and pay for a bus to take us to someone's home.   Lots of parent volunteers are needed!!!!

May 9th or 10th Chattanooga Nature Center  (will need parent volunteers)

May 18th  Althaus Park/playground behind the Signal Mtn. Golf and Country Club  (no volunteers needed)

 

Panther Pride Winners:

 

Lindsey   Weston   Ava   Jackson   Logan   Quimby   Gina   Ella   Nicholas

First Grade

reading

reading

Math:

We will continue to work on automatic recall of addition and subtraction facts.

The children will become very familiar with place value in our next math unit.  Understanding place value requires integrating the concept of grouping tens with the knowlege of how groups are recorded in our place-value system.  The children will learn that counting by tens is a lot more efficient than counting by ones depending on the size of the group.  They will learn how to identify how many groups of tens and ones in a 2 digit number.

Literacy

Our first grade goal is to develop each student into an excellent reader and thinker!

The most important goal in reading instruction is to equip readers to understand what he/she has read, apply the information, then connect it to his/her life.  First graders should read at least on 'Level J' before advancing to second grade.

Each child is either working on sight word cards and/or Accelerated Reading quizzes.   The children love the 'trip to the treasure chest' when they reach certain goals!

The best way to help your child is to ask the questions that are on the first page of the purple reading folders. These are 'thinking' questions that ask for more than just recall the facts about the book.   The reading folders will come home on Tuesday.  We ran out of time on Monday. 

Science & Social Studies

 

We are looking forward to learning about the North and South Poles, the water cycle, weather, temperature, states of matter and magnets.