We had another busy week in the first grade, D’vash, classroom. It was great to have our first full week of school.! On Tuesday, we celebrated our first class birthday. The students used their schema to write and illustrate pages for a birthday book. We also had our first visit from the shlichim, young emissaries from Israel. The shlichim are young people who have graduated high school and come to the U.S. to volunteer for the year before going off to the army. We are lucky to have two shlichim, a young man, Aviv, and a young woman, Tal, who will be coming to spend time with us on a weekly basis. We look forward to getting to know them better and having them teach the D’vash students a lot about life in Israel.
In D’vash, we have begun Fundations, the phonics program that we are using to teach decoding and spelling. We will complete the review chapter next week and move on to introduce new material. The children selected books for Reader’s Workshop, our structured and supported independent reading time. We are continuing to do some initial reading assessments with individual children to determine what they need to work on to enable them to move forward. We have been talking in general about what readers do when they read. If you have a chance, take a look at the first grade bulletin board for some of our ideas. In the course of our read-alouds, we have begun talking about a couple of specific strategies that readers use including using the pictures in the book to help better understand the content. In addition, we have been reading a number of books with rhymes and have been practicing making our own rhymes. Rhyming words are a great foundation for understanding word families and building early reading skills.
In math, we have been doing some review and assessments as well. We have continued to compare numbers using the mathematical symbols > < and =. Ask your children to teach you the game Compare (hint-it is basically like War) and Double Compare (you choose two cards, add them together and determine if your total number is greater or less than your opponent’s total). We also began our science unit with a quick assessment today. The unit is called “Growing Things.”
In tefillah, we had Havdalah with kindergarten, second and third grades this past Monday. We will be getting together with these classes on Mondays on a regular basis to explore in more depth a variety of prayers.
We are looking forward to our field trip next Friday and I am hoping that the weather will be as gorgeous as it is today.
Shabbat Shalom!
Hamorah Joanne