First Grade Weekly News
by Eva Dittmar
January 22, 2008
First Grade Cuties!
This Week’s Story:
Johnny Appleseed
This Week’s Spelling and Vocabulary Words:
• wait
• tail
• rain
• say
• day
• way
• how
• pretty
• little
• live
• light
This Week’s Interesting News:
• We are looking forward to our field trip this Thursday, Jan. 24th to see the play Go, Dog. Go! We will be back in time to eat lunch at school.
• We have accepted Mr. Anderson’s challenge to read, read, read! He is going to owe each and every student in my class either an Ice Skating Party or Laser Rock if they reach their reading goal. Keep working on those library books and taking those RC tests! Look out, Mr. Anderson…here we come!
• We have started our China unit and are learning many interesting things! Each day the Student of the Day gets to have Mei Mei our little Panda bear for company on his/her desk.
• The 100th day of school is this week! Where did the time go!?
• Thanks to all the students and parents that came to ISAT/ILSB testing night. It was close but our class earned the popcorn/movie party for most students attending. We look forward to inviting the students from the other 1st grade rooms who attended that night so they can join us for some fun and relaxation.
• This class is amazing when it comes to telling time to the minute! A first grade goal is to be able to tell time to the hour/half hour, but this class has really caught on and it is almost impossible to stump them on telling time now!
• Wow, I was really impressed at the improvement I see on our sentence dictation tests! I can tell students are really putting to use their sentence writing skills. Nice job!
• Reviewing and working on our ROAR behavior lately has really paid off! We earned FIVE class tickets today just for being such a wonderful class and showing it in the hallways. Way to go!
• We are going to the RC store in the library this week. We have earned many points and will get to “shop” for some treats with them. Thanks to Mrs. Joost for the time it takes to by and set up the RC store for the kids!
• This Friday, we will be enjoying our pizza party compliments of Mr. Aplin. Our class brought in the most Box Tops and Mr. Aplin has arranged for them to enjoy a pizza party at the end of the day. I owe them a treat for getting so many class compliments and class tickets so I will add a movie onto the pizza party. Part of the movie will be watched during the pizza party and the rest during our popcorn party the following week. We love to celebrate our accomplishments!
Reading Suggestions:
Parents, please take a few minutes each day to go over your child’s reading story. Doing something different each night adds interest and helps your child become a stronger reader. Some suggestions:
• Have your child read the whole story to you.
• You read the whole story to your child while he/she tracks each word with a finger.
• Ask your child to take you on a “picture walk” of the story. Your child just tells you the story in his/her own words using the pictures as a guide.
• “Partner read” where you read a page, then he/she reads a page.
• Both parent and child read the story together as one voice.
• Do a vocabulary search! Find all the words from our vocabulary list and see how many times each one is used in the story.
• Have your child tell you the whole story IN ORDER from memory without looking at the book.
