Week of September 15th

Dear 1st Grade Families,

I would like to thank everyone for making it to our Open House this week! I hope you were able to get a sense of my teaching style, goals for your children and the curriculum for the year. It's a lot to pack into 45 minutes, so please feel free to contact me with any questions. I will also apologize again for the difficulty I had with operating the Smart Board! I even came into school last Saturday to go through the presentation to make sure it worked - go figure!!

I have enjoyed interacting with and getting to know each student this week! They all have such wonderful yet different personalities - together, we complete the perfect puzzle! 

This week we have spent a lot of time getting to know one another and going over classroom rules and expectations. We engaged in some fun "get to know you" activities. The students even went on a fun scavenger hunt throughout our classroom to learn about me! One bonus question was to guess how old I was - I have to say I was a little disappointed at some of the guesses : ) Each day in our class a new student will be appointed as the "Person of the Day." This person will be our line leader, messenger, and will also help with various tasks throughout the day. For the first 22 days of school we will have a small celebration for each student in an effort to learn a bit more about them. We will count the letters in his/her name, create a name puzzle, cheer their name, have a question and answer session, and finally we will each create a portrait of this student. Be on the lookout for the pictures and certificate in the weeks to come! This is always an exciting activity for the students. 

We read many books this week to guide our discussions about new learning, rules, expectations and building friendships throughout this year. One of my favorites is called My Brave Year of Firsts. This book will serve as our motto - to be brave (trying new things and never giving up no matter what), being true (good decision making), and being strong (exercising our minds)!

We also read the book The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes - the story of a little girl who is a perfectionist. She was known as the girl who never made mistakes...until one day she did! 

We learned that mistakes are going to happen this year and they are A-OKAY!  This year we will embrace our mistakes and learn from them.  I told the students a story of a good teacher friend of mine named Miss Take. She ALWAYS made mistakes. She forgot to do so many things like taking attendance, giving the students snack, sending them to the wrong special, misspelling words, wearing two different shoes, and calling a student by the wrong name. When we finished, I told them that Miss Take was really ME! They got a kick out of this!  

This week we have added our first poem to our poetry binders as well as made two journal entries. The students also took their very first spelling test. This was actually a quick assessment of 30 priority words that the students will be expected to spell correctly by the end of the year. I can show you these at our October conferences.

In the week ahead we will dive into our Daily 5 program. I plan to begin with "Read to Self" and will set a stamina goal of 15 minutes by the end of the week. I also plan on beginning to explore "Work on Writing" by Friday as we will start our first Writing Workshop unit on Wednesday. The first unit is Narrative writing. The students will be asked to write a pre-assessment piece for me on Tuesday just so I can see his/her writing abilities which will help me guide my instruction for individuals/groups of students. We began our first Math unit - Understanding Addition - and we will continue this week also. Throughout the unit students will 

1. understand the numbers 6-9 can be broken into parts of the whole in different way.

2. understand parts of a whole in relation to addition.

Our language arts curriculum will focus on a review of kindergarten skills as we will focus on initial and final consonants. We will also look at basic sentence structure. We will look at various sentences and ask ourselves 2 questions: Does it look right? Does it sound right? We will review proper sentence structure (capitals at the beginning, spaces between words, and punctuation) as well as forming complete sentences that make sense. 

Whew! Week one is done and we've already done so much and next week proves to be busy (yet fun) as well! I'm here to help, so please let me know if I can be of assistance. Please note that reading logs went home today and should be returned on Friday. As stated at Open House, students should be reading 5 out of 7 nights for at least 15 minutes and they (or you) should record their reading on the chart. Please return the log to school each Friday and a new one will be sent home. Thank you in advance for helping to promote independence and a love for reading with your child!

Fondly,

Kerry

kgaudiello@bcsd.neric.org