Typical Day

Today was a typical day in first grade. Students wrote in their journals upon arriving at school. After completing their daily prompt, they are free to work on thinking skills or read. We have our class meeting and work with the calendar and other skills. Today we practiced skip counting. Other days we count money, tell time, estimate, or problem solve.

We had reading workshop this morning and read a big book about the four seasons. We will refer back to this book next week when we do a formal writing prompt. I met with my reading group that is in the first grade reading basal, and we practiced our spelling words and read a new story about tap dancing. We also learned some new robust vocabulary words.

In writing workshop we practiced spelling rhyming words and played a game called Sparkle to practice our word family words. So far we have learned the "ack", "at", and "ap" families. All students are introduced to a new word family each week, even my fluent readers. However only the students who need it are working with these words on a daily basis with me or with an instructional assistant.

In math we are continuing to learn new strategies to practice our addition facts. Students drew dots to count for tricky problems today. We have talked about counting on our fingers and using cubes or other manipulatives already. Do not worry if yourchild is bringing home their incomplete timed test each day. All students will pass it eventually. I have a couple of children who have passed the first test, but it is not required at this time. We also watched a short 15 minute video about money.

Tomorrow we will have our first spelling test, and work some more on our school project.