Dear Parents,                                                     March 7, 2011

Happy Monday!  Big changes in the first grade classroom- yes, I had nothing better to do Friday night – so I rearranged the classroom!  We love to work in small groups with our aides and I am trying to streamline the moving from center to center.  The classroom seems more open – hopefully everyone is happy!

Our reading strategy this week is “monitor and clarify”.  Stopping to reread especially if there are words we have difficulty reading and making sure the sentence and the story make sense to us are strategies that good readers use.  The comprehension skill that helps us with this strategy is sequencing events.  Knowing what took place in the beginning, middle, and end of the story is important for comprehension.  Our phonics focus this week is the sound of /oo/ as in cook or look.  We are also working on compound words (cupcake) and words with multiple meanings – ring -what is worn on your finger or the sound a bell makes.  This week, our spelling words are from unit 35 and are compound words.  Please help your child learn to spell these words by breaking them into the two words.  However, remember that they need to be spelled as one word on the spelling test.  Now that we are in the third trimester I am going to look for correct letters – no backwards letters or uppercase letters unless it is a proper noun or the beginning of the sentence.  Please remember to go online to Spellingcity.com and continue to practice the posted words – play the games and take the test.  Our grammar focus this week continues to be on proper nouns for people and places.

We started a new chapter in math last week.  We are moving on to sums to 12.  Now that we do not have enough fingers, math becomes more difficult. We will need to use our fact families, doubles, and patterns for 10 to help us.

In religion, we are learning that Jesus teaches us to love others. This ties in wonderfully for our Lenten journey.  Starting with Ash Wednesday, our focus is on our journey to become closer to God – what better way than to love our neighbors as our Lord loves us.

One more week of focusing on social studies to finish up our unit on community.  We should be ready for our test on Thursday.

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

This week it is All About…Anthony.  Congratulations!

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

Mrs. Manning