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First Grade - Week of May 6

 



MARK YOUR CALENDAR

May 13: Spring Concert 1:30 - First Graders Wear Orange

May 17: Celebration Cinema Field Trip - Please see note below

May 20: LBW Race at High School Track 4:30 - 6:00

May 24: Fun Day

May 29: Walk to KDL, East Branch to learn about summer reading

May 31: Last Day of School - Half Day


IMPORTANT INFORMATION


Mothers Day: Please keep a special little envelope in your child’s Home Folder unopened until Mothers Day … your child has a special gift for you! I hope you enjoy a day celebrating all the wonderful things you do each and every day as a mom.




KDL Library Card Registration: We will be walking to the Kent District Library EGR Branch on May 29. The students will have an opportunity to get library cards during our tour. In home folders today, there will be a pamphlet describing the library card and KDL Library Card Registration form. If you would like your child to receive a library card on May 29, please complete the registration form and return by Monday, May 13. If your child already has a library card then you can disregard this paperwork.


Celebration Cinema Field Trip - We are looking forward to watching To The Arctic at Celebration Cinema on Friday, May 17th. We will be leaving school at 8:45 and returning by 11:00. Please send in a booster with your child on Friday.  We are looking forward to having many parents join us. Please look for an additional email if you are driving.

Learning Commons: We had our last visit to the Learning Commons this week. Please make sure that your child brings back any books they checked out or any books that have been missing from our library next week. They should have brought home a bright pink sheet of paper listing any books that are missing. Thank you! If you are interested in some series titles to help inspire your child to read over the summer, you can check out this curated list from our library director, Mrs. Webber, here!


Summer Learning Opportunities: Here are some resources for summer learning from the Kent ISD along with different summer programs for children. 


WEEK AT A GLANCE


Literacy Workshop

Narrative Writing: We focused on really zooming in on the beginnings, middles, and endings of our series books making sure they have all of the components needed for each section. We also focused on spelling patterns with r-controlled vowels within our writing. Today, we “shared the mic” by reading one of our completed series books to the class.


Reading: We’ve been working on studying our characters and supporting characters in our fiction books. This has helped us to infer things characters might think or say. We’ve also been paying attention to characters’ feelings in our text and how these feelings change throughout the story.


A big thing we’ll continue to work on is describing our characters’ feelings using more sophisticated vocabulary than happy, sad, mad. These are great words, but there are SO MANY more specific words to describe feelings. Here are some you can encourage at home:

  • {happy} glad, cheerful, delighted, excited, overjoyed, ecstatic, elated

  • {sad} blue, gloomy, upset, miserable, dreadful, depressed

  • {angry} cranky, cross, bitter, frustrated, aggressive, enraged, furious, outraged

  • {worried} nervous, anxious, panicked, afraid, scared, fearful, terrified


Comprehension and talking about the text with more mature vocabulary becomes important in second grade so these are great for getting your first grader prepared for this shift.

 

Phonics: That “r-controlled vowel” comes with a lot to remember. This week we discovered that sometimes -OR and -AR also make the /-er/ sound (like in doctor, and dollar).


We also explored the many sounds of -EAR (Earth, heart, bear, and hear)


Math

We started our last “secret unit” in math! YAY! This week we focused on developing a sense of time and its passage. Our first grade standard is for students to tell time to the hour and half-hour. In second grade they will learn to tell time to the nearest 5 minutes. What exactly does this mean? How long is a second, a minute, an hour? Students had opportunities to experiment with each unit of time to develop a sense of duration.

























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