Welcome to Mrs. England’s Class

What a busy year we are having!  I hope the children are having as much fun as I am.

In Language Arts we have finished studying word families with short vowel sounds and long vowels with a silent e, now we are studying irregular vowel patterns.  Most of the books we read in reading group have words with the word family of the week.  The phonics poem also stresses this word family.  All the children are now taking Accelerated Reader tests.  Many children have earned their 10 point button (Nathan, Jarod, Nicholas, Zane, Trinity, Gabriel, Alex, Lindsey, Micah, Kelly, Brian, Kimberly, Jacoby, Alexis, Dillon, Eric, Micheal, Sydney, Lizzy, Colton, Aurora and Valerie) some have earned their 25 point button (Trinity, Gabriel, Lindsey, Micah, Kelly, Brian, Eric, Sydney and Valerie) and congratulations to Lindsey who has earned her 50 point button.  The most important thing you can do to help your child’s reading is to set aside time every day to read.   Sometimes your child should read by themselves, sometimes they should read the words with you, and sometimes you should read to them.  We use all of these formats in class.  The children also write everyday.  The main skill we are working on is an opening and a closing sentence.  Many children need to be reminded to start a sentence with a capital letter and end it with a punctuation mark.  We use the word wall to help us spell high–frequency words.    

In math we have worked on reading and writing numbers. We have made patterns with many different manipulatives and will continue to do so.  We have made graphs and discussed what they show.  Everyday we read our lunch graph.  Graphing is another skill we will practice and use all year long.    We are now working on money – one of the hardest concept for first graders to grasp.  We are identifying coins and their value.  We need to know what is a penny, nickel, dime and quarter and how many pennies each is worth.  They also need to be able to count a collection of nickels, dimes and pennies less than 100 cents.  The students who can do that easily are adding coins with quarters.  We have started Eagle Math – a weekly timed math facts test.   Congratulations to the following students who have passed level 5: Nathan, Jarod, Nicholas, Zane. Trinity, Qiarra, Gabriel, Alex, Lindsey, Micah, Kelly, Brian, Kim, Jacoby, Alexis, Dillon, Eric, Andy, Micheal, Sydney, Lizzy, Colton, Aurora and Valerie.  Congrats also to Jarod  Zane, Trinity, Alex, Lindsey, Micah, Kelly, Brian, Jacoby, Alexis, Dillon, Eric, Micheal, Sydney, Lizzy, Colton,Aurora and Valerie who also passed level 10.  Valerie is working on level 15 and Lindsey has passed it.

In social studies we started the year by brainstorming rules we need to have in our classroom so that we all can be happy, safe, and able to learn.  All the rules the children came up with can be summarized by saying respect everyone and everything. We talked about the traits of a good citizen and concluded in November with the importance of voting.  We are now studying maps and map skills.  The students have mailed Flat images of them to relatives and friends around the country/world.  We put little pictures on a map to show where we sent ourselves.  We will learn about directions and map keys and legends.    We hope to find out how people live in different parts of the country and world.  Our Flat ‘Mes” are coming in and we love reading about where we’ve been and seeing pictures of different places.

In science we went for an observation walk around the school to see what we could see, hear, and smell.  After we came back, we made a class book on the things we observed.  Each week we feel what is in the science box, guess what it is and then we get to see what it was and talk about it.  For Earth Day we read many environmental books and talked about how we can help the earth.  Next we will be studying animals and making a book about the different groups of animals.  We are looking at the needs and characteristics of animals.  We will also discuss how animals react to the different seasons.