Helping Out

While this upcoming week is a short week with a student holiday and teacher work day on Friday there will be plenty of opportunities to lend a helping hand. Our week's reading theme in based on helping out and the story Little Red Hen. First graders will focus on retelling stories to make sure they understand what happened. When retelling we will make sure that the events we share are in chronological order. Spelling words and phonics instruction for the week will center on words with the short e sound like the sound we here in the word ten. Spelling words are: beg, get, hen, leg, let, and men. High frequency words to know and use are: who, some, of, no, and eat. Kindergarten will continue letter work learning and practicing naming letters and sounds, as well as writing the manuscripts for "K" and "U." This weeks Dolch Sight words are: up, we, where, yellow, and you.

Tomorrow is Columbus Day. We will take some time to discuss who Christopher Columbus is and what he did way back when in 1492. In social studies Kindergarten will continue their study of community helpers and are invited to dress up as a community helper they might want to be when they grow up on Thursday October 14th. This means that they can come dressed to school as a teacher, fire fighter, police officer.... and the list goes on and on.

In science both 1st grade and Kindergarten will be classifying the world around them and the objects they come into contact with by their physical features such as size, texture, temperature... We will also review our senses as we use them to classify.

Mad minutes in mathematics. A skill that is all too important to go unnoticed and under taught is our addition facts. This week first grade is going to continue to practice and learn about addition principles as well and practice quick recall of basic addition facts. It is vital that the students learn these facts now so that all other math concepts that use addition facts will be mastered much easier. Kindergarten is continuing to build upon their number sense, counting and identifying numbers on their hundreds chart. This week we will be learning and practicing how to count by 10's, 5's and 2's.