Welcome everyone to a new year and a new adventure! We all survived the first week pretty well I might add. I hope you all had a fabulous long week end with your families and got to hear lots of stories from the first week of school.
We are still getting to know each other and working on class routine and rules. We have 24 students this year in my grade one class, 11 girls and 13 boys. This is my 4th year at Holy Name school and my 5th year teaching grade one. I taught two years in PEI before taking the plunge and moving to the big city of Calgary. I love teaching this age group! I hope that your child is adjusting well to the new routine. I know some of them must have seemed a little tired when they got home, seeing that they are not use to a full day of school. You will notice them adjusting a little better in the coming months. It is important that they get their rest, because it can be tiring learning a new language.
I use the blog to inform you all of what is going on at school but also what we will be covering in class for the week. I hope you read it every week as there is a lot of information, suggestions and games that you might want to try out at home to help your child progress through out the school year...it also takes me a long time to sit down and write! I am usually really good at keeping it up dated but then will have my moments, stay on me! At the beginning of every month I will post what your child will be covering, the theme, math concepts and so on. If you need anything feel free to contact me anytime via email or give the school a call.
This months theme is "A l'ecole avec mes amis" At school with my friends. This week in class we are reviewing the letter sounds for the letters t, n, o, l and e in French. I like to teach these sounds with hand actions from the Jolly Phonics program. Its a great tool for those who need a visual or movement to remember things. Feel free to ask them to show you. (lets hope they remember some from last week) As I teach the letter sounds I have the students also work on their printing skills. They are learning proper pencil grip, how to follow a line of print and the differences between upper and lower case letters. This year I will be using the sky, grass, dirt strategy to help the students write and form letters properly. You will learn more about this at the grade one reading night coming up at the end of the month. If you would like to practice printing at home some fun things to try are drawing the letters in sugar, flour or fill a ziplock with paint and have them practice on the bag. You can also get a white board at Dollarama and practice with that. Play-doh is also fun! These are also great ways to practice sight words.
In Science, the students are learning all about colors and how to mix certain colors together to make lighter, darker or another color all together. We will be doing some fun experiments in the next couple of weeks. I was hoping that some brave soul might want to come into class and make play-doh with us or if you have any other fun color mixing experiments? If your up to it please let me know.
In math, we are reviewing numbers 0-10 in French and learning how to recognize and write the French written number. We will be starting our math unit in the next couple of days, which is patterns. Students will be learning about different patterns they can make, what is repetition, prolonging of patterns and how to have several different attributes to one pattern. We have started our number printing book as well. I encourage you to count with your child at home as high as they can count in French and practice writing the numbers out in order.
We will be starting our social studies unit in the next couple of days. The students will be learning how important they are in their community and groups that they belong too.
That's about it for now. I hope to meet all of you at the BBQ on Thursday. It is from 3-5pm. Please be sure to hunt me down and introduce yourself. Scholastic orders are due on Friday. Please be sure to send them in on or before then.
Have a great week! Feel free to contact me anytime.
Laurie-Anne :)
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