F

the FIRST GRADE NEWS

MRS. MOHRS CLASS

READING
I am ofcially done with all assessments, and will be resuming reading groups next week. I cant wait to begin instructing with these groups again. I will be putting together reading goals for each child, and will send home a new Parent Pipeline with information about your childs goal next week. As you read through it, please let me know if you have any questions. ! We also spent the last two weeks talking about visualizing the stories we read to help us understand what the book is about. This is especially helpful in chapter books. Whether your child can read a chapter book by themselves, or if you are reading one to them, ask them to share what they are visualizing, and the picture or movie they created in their head. Next week, we will begin working on inferring, and using clues in the story to answer questions.

As your child is reading, help them gure out clues that are in the story that arent told to them directly. For instance, if the sentence read, It was a warm, hot, day... they would know that it must be summer. By learning how to infer, your child is gaining a deeper level of understanding to the story.

Our reading strategy of the month is: Inferring

February:

Upcoming Dates and Announcements

14 Friendship Party (12:15-1:15) 17 Star of the Week: Gavin 18 Music Concert (10-10:30) 24 Swimming Begins 24 Star of the Week: Taylor

25 Guest Author Katie McKy

March:

6 Science and Author Fair 17-21 Spring Break

10 Star of the Week: Colin 14 100th Day of School

Swimming

In rst grade, one of the physical education units is swimming. The class will take the bus over to the Natatorium once a week, which will be in lieu of their regular physical education time. Swimming will begin the week of February 24, and our class will have swimming on Friday mornings, so our rst ofcial day will be the 28th. I included a new class schedule in the BEE books which shows the changes in times, and you will also be able to nd it on my website. Following the swimming unit, we will resume our regular schedule. There is also a letter from Jake Maag, the gym teacher explaining this unit in greater detail. Please let me know if you have any questions about this.

Math

The class continued to work hard in math this week. We spent a lot of time working with tally marks (counting and using them) as well as base ten blocks (ones and tens). We played a great game today called, Race to 100. The kids played with a partner, and had to roll a die. They collected that number of units (ones), and the idea was once they had ten, they had to trade them in for a rod (a set of ten). The rst person to reach 100 was the winner. My purpose for teaching this is to show them the idea of carrying over, which will eventually bridge into two-digit addition. They had a lot of fun with this game. I have also placed the kids into math groups (similar to reading groups) based on their scores on the math screener. Beginning next week, I will be pulling math groups during our math Daily 5 time. We will also be starting our seventh math unit of the year.

We had a nishing/catch-up week in writing this week. I had a lot of kids in the middle of a variety of writing projects. I wanted them to nish up any stories they had going, and we are going to begin a new writing unit next week on opinion/persuasive writing. We will be having guest author Katie McKy joining us again at the end of the month, and she will be working with each grade level on this specic type of writing, so I wanted to make sure we had a chance to start working with it prior to her visit. I am excited about teaching this style of writing.

Writing

Science

In science, we have been studying solids and liquids. We spent the last few weeks doing different things with solids, and will be moving on to liquids next week. Be sure to ask your child about their new understandings in the world of matter. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact Kaite Mohr at (608) 497-2176 or kaite.mohr@verona.k12.wi.us