Dear Parents,                                                     November 15, 2010

What an exciting week we have planned in first grade!  Today we are having our Chumash Native American Presentation from the Ventura Outreach Program.  We will also be watching a movie from California Streaming in the computer lab on the Pilgrims’ trip to America as a preview to our study of the First Thanksgiving in social studies.  We will start practicing for our Readers’ Theatre Play too.  And of course, Thursday is our field trip!  (We will be back for P.E. so remember to wear your P.E. uniform).  The excitement continues with Primary Centers on Friday and we will also enjoy a snack at recess with our school families (the snack will be provided by our eighth grade parents!)

We are starting theme 4 in our reading series this week.  The theme is “Family & Friends”.  Our reading strategy is “summarizing”. After reading a story, we should be able to retell the important parts of the story. While reading, we pay attention to the main idea and the important details in the story and this will help us retell the story.  Our comprehension skill this week is “drawing conclusions”.  While reading, we pay attention to what is happening in the story not only for summarizing but also for drawing conclusions.  Thinking critically, and being able to conclude or make a true generalization from a story will help us become good, strategic readers.  Our phonics focus this week is words with ‘l’ clusters.   We will also review contractions with ‘s, consonant ‘r’ clusters and short /o/ words in our reading.   Our grammar focus continues to be on the naming and action parts of sentences.  The children are having a little difficulty with this.  Please practice this concept at home.  Make simple sentences and ask your child to find the naming part (what the sentence is about – the “who” or “what”) and the action part (the verb – or what the “who” or “what” is doing).  This week, our spelling words are from unit 14 – clusters with ‘l’.  We continue with using the different strategies we learned for addition in practicing our subtraction in math.  In religion, we will concentrate on the beautiful prayer, The Our Father.  We will focus on social studies this week and next, learning about the Native Americans, the Pilgrims and Colonial Settlers.

As mentioned above, we will be performing a Readers’ Theatre Performance of the First Thanksgiving.  This is a play, but it is not memorized.  Instead, the parts are read from a script.  This will be read many times during the week, which will help with our fluency.  We will wear simple costume pieces that will be made.  We will perform it next Tuesday at 11:00 for our sixth grade buddies and any parents that would like to come are most welcome.

Please remind your child to bring their library book to school tomorrow so that they may check out a new one.

Water bottle sales continue on Tuesday and Thursday.  Thank you for your support!

Wednesday, the 17th is a free dress day!  The cost is $1.00 and your child must wear pink or blue.  The proceeds will go to Cancer Research.

Friday is Primary Centers and a noon dismissal as the teachers have a staff meeting.

It is All About…Nicholas this week.  Congratulations!

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.  Have a wonderful week!

Mrs. Manning