Happy February!

Brrrrrr! It's cold outside, but our 1st grade scholars are working hard to keep their brains warmed up as we get ready for 2nd grade. You can help support our learning by making sure your scholar is doing his or her homework on a nightly basis. Our homework is designed to directly support what we are learning at school. Our weekly spelling tests make it crucial that your child is practicing our sight words at home so they can confidently read AND spell these words on our test. Also encourage your scholar to read baby read! The more we practice reading, the more confident we'll be when we take our big reading tests this spring. Keep up the great work as we press on toward 2nd grade (and beyond!)

Please make sure your scholar has turned in his or her RE-ENROLLMENT FORMS for next school year. If our team has 100% every scholar gets to take home a $2 bill. WOW! We need your help though. If you are not planning on returning to HLA next year, just let me know in your scholar's FALCON folder and it will still count toward 100%. If you need an extra form, please let me know asap. Thank you!

Reading:
We are continuing our study of fairy tales around the world and this week we are diving into Goldilocks and the Three Bears. This unit has been SO much fun as we learn about characters, settings, problem and solution in fiction texts. We are also working on summarizing stories and figuring out the central idea. Next week we will move into READERS THEATRE and work on reading fluently like storytellers as we put on our own theatrical productions of famous fairy tales. Your scholar will become an actor or actress and help design the set (setting) and a mask that illustrates his or her character.

Math:
We have a class of MATHEMATICIANS in 1st grade. We are tackling some tough stuff as we learn about how TWO DIGIT numbers are composed and decomposed. We are working on comparing two digit numbers to see if the are greater than, less than, or equal to each other. At the end of the week, we will start to ADD and SUBTRACT two digit numbers... just like 2nd graders :)

Writing:
We are continuing to work on our teaching books and are working on adding tables of contents and stretching our ideas out into chapters. We are also working on editing by adding spaces, capitalization, and correct beginning and ending punctuation. Our authors have come so far this year and I love watching them continue to grow.

Tricky Words: (Scholars should be able to READ and SPELL these words)
know
then
think
could
has

Vocabulary Words (Challenge your scholar to use these words in context throughout the day. They do a ROCKSTAR job of this at school :)
charming: delightful, adorable
scalding: extremely hot
satisfied: content, pleased
smithereens: small pieces
discover: to notice or learn something new
explanation: a statement that makes something clear