1st grade News 

May Updates 

In the summer of 2009, one of the teachers at Indian Head passed away from a sudden illness.  Ms. McMullen was an amazing teacher and a real gift to all of her students and the whole school.  On Thursday, May 6th we will be having a memorial here at school to honor her and her amazing work.  As this is a sensitive matter, we sent home a permission slip in April for you to fill out to allow your student to attend.  Please return the permission slip, either indicating you will allow your child to attend (it is being held during school hours) or if you wish your student to NOT ATTEND.  Please return the slips as soon as possible. 

Literacy

We will finish our unit on nonfiction about the forest and animals.  We will focus on organizing information and using details to better understand the information in the story.  We will also work on our new unit, Special Friends.  We will read many books about friends.  And we will also learn that friends come in many different shapes and sizes.  We will talk about grandparents, other family members, and animals as friends, and also how to make friends.

We write sequences, giving directions in a specific order.  We will also focus on writing the solution to a problem.  Let's see what kinds of problems we can make and more importantly how we can fix the problem!  We will also make a report about butterflies after we finish our unit on nature.

In spelling, we will continue to have a specific spelling rule each week.  This month we will be working on different -y sounds, making a word plural by dropping the -y and adding –ies, and also adding different suffixes to the end of a word. 

Math

We will continue working on different counting strategies this month.  We will review counting by 2s, 10s, and start on 5s.  We hope to be able to count to 100 using each way by the end of the unit!  We will be using the 100s chart and the large number line as tools to help us count and we will also be on the lookout for patterns when we are using those tools.

We will also be reviewing combinations of 10 this month.  We will play good games we learned earlier in the school year, such as Tens Go Fish and Make Ten and we will also be working on story problems that revolve around the number 10.

Sincerely,
Miss Hansen, Miss Heard, and Mr. Kennedy