First Graders had an eventful and busy month of October! Students learned various subjects through hands-on instruction. First Graders went on their FIRST EVER school field trip during the month of October! Students had the pleasure of attending a performance at Powell Hall. The highlight of our month is a toss-up between our field trip to Powell Hall, the Glendale Fire Department visiting for Fire Safety Month, Grandparents’ Day, or our Halloween Parade around the neighborhood!
Here are some of the things our First Graders have been working on during the month of October:
- Students focused on using reading strategies such as Listening Lion, Skippy Kangaroo, Eagle Eyes, Chunky Monkey, Stretchy the Snake, Flippy the Dolphin, and Lips the Fish to decode and analyze unfamiliar words when reading.
- First Graders are working on various comprehension skills through fiction and nonfiction texts.
- Spelling words (Second Grade curriculum) that focus on vowel sound: al, consonant blends, blend: nk and digraph: ng, short vowel sounds, and vowel-consonant-e. Whew!!
- Writing legibly and with appropriate spacing for a variety of purposes
- Ensuring that sentences start with a capital letter and end with punctuation
- Singapore Math- Studying ways to subtract using number bonds, making subtraction stories, using real-world problems to subtract, and making fact families
- Singapore Math- The exploration of plane and solid shapes, making pictures and models with shapes, making patterns with plane and solid shapes, and new vocabulary
- It’s a Small World After All! Postcard Project continues! Students enjoy putting new push pins in the map, reading postcards from around the world, and learning about the world around them!
- Showing responsibility with both our younger EC Buddies and our Senior Kindergarten Math Buddies
- Project- First Graders worked with both Second and Third Grade to start a project called Schnucks Shoppers. Students had a community expert come in to talk about Schnucks, wrote about their personal experiences with grocery stores, and discussed what they knew about grocery stores. There are many more “pieces to the puzzle” to run a grocery store than one may think!
- Students continued to work on team building, collaboration, compromising, and problem-solving skills.
- Archie the Eagle continues to travel home with one lucky First Grader each weekend! The student picked to bring Archie home must write about their time with Archie in an Adventures with Archie journal! First Graders must include the following in their writing: name, date, title, juicy words and details.
- First, Second and Third Grade started a Kindness is Cooler! project. The classes read the book Kindness is Cooler, Mrs. Ruler by Margery Cuyler. Students then decided to start their own project, keeping an eye out for random acts of kindness! This project is teaching our students to be even more empathetic, kind, and caring than they already are!
First Graders worked hard during the month of October! Stay posted to see what November brings for First Grade!
– Ms. Coleman
