We are back into the swing of things and what a GREAT week we had! It’s amazing to me how much these little ones seem to grow over the break! It sounds like everyone has been busy, but also very excited to be back at school! This week was full of review! Routines and procedures have been practiced over and over to review and refine! We are starting many new units- which have proved to ignite some major excitement within the room!

Reading – The first graders worked hard on a new compression strategy…VISUALIZING!  We talked about how good readers think while they read and one of the ways that they are thinking is by making a picture in their head while they read.  We focused on how good readers visualize…to understand their story better, by using their schema and the words, and by changing their picture as their story changes. We had a blast starting out visualizing poems. This week we will focus on stories to help the kids focus on the pictures they create in their minds as they listened.  The kids were great at explaining their pictures by pointing out their schema or clues from the words that shaped their pictures.

Writing – We have been studying books that contain letter writing and persuasion. We have also written a pre-assessment piece to begin the unit. Next week we will focus on different topics we can write an opinion letter on. We learned that a writer finds topics through their strong feelings. We’ve started the discussion with things like: later bedtimes, eating (or not eating) vegetables at dinner, watching certain movies or TV shows, and wanting toys or games. This is a fun unit for our kids!

Math – We have come to one of the trickier concepts in this Math unit- using doubles to help solve equations. Using doubles to add is a strategy that will prove very helpful when we are solving equations that are close or similar to doubles. (i.e. 6+6=12 is similar to 6+7=13) Be sure to practice you child’s doubles facts to 20, extra practice at home will help them use this strategy effectively! The other concept we worked on this week was to decompose 2-digit numbers into tens and ones. We can take a number such as 46 and think of it as 4-tens and 6-ones. This skill is vital to being able to add 2-digit numbers! Counting by 10’s and switching to 1’s is something we will be practicing often to make sure that we are ready to add larger equations!