Grade 1 Weekly Newsletter Sept. 11

Dear Parents,As our second week begin, we are very busy learning the

rules and routines of first grade. It is hard and very tiring, but the children are doing a great job. This week, we have started seeing some of our specialist: library, music and gym.

In penmanship and reading, we are reviewing our sounds and sight words. We have started our first reader and we are starting to learn how reading the story of King Midas. We learned three different reading strategies. We use our magic finger for pointing, we look at the pictures for clues of what a word might be and we get our lips ready with the beginning sound.

A big part of first grade is being able to listen and follow directions. We played a follow-the-direction game while learning how to recognize and draw our two dimensional shapes.

We worked on our coloring, cutting, and pasting skills, some of us were a little rusty at it. We talked about having to take our time and do our best, because in first grade, we have to go back and do it again to make it first grade quality.

In math, we are working on how to form the numbers correctly and recognizing numbers 1 to 20. Counting backwards

is more difficult. We had a great time playing Number Bingo to 20. We also started to learn the dot touch math system.

We had fun reading the circle story called If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. For art, we made a mouse puppet and it came out so cute. The next day we make a circle banner showing the sequence of the story.

In religion, we are learning about how God made us unique and that we each have our own special talents. We drew pictures of our unique self and made our own absolutely gorgeous glitter crosses. Picture to come next week.

In music this week, we worked on free movement. Mr. McChung, our music teacher, played the bongo as we danced. OH! what great fun and he thought we were so well behaved.

For our Friday Family Meeting, we had a special ceremony to celebrate our “first

responders” and to remember 9/11. The 5th through 8th grades presented several poems for the responders.

We were thrilled with our special guest: the policemen, firemen, and two of the police horses. It was very exciting.

Very Cool!