April Board Report
First Grade 2015-2016
Lesson Summative:
The first grade students continue to amaze me with their
enthusiasm for math! The past few weeks we have been learning
about fact families, related facts and addition and subtraction
strategies. We spent a couple of days learning what a fact family
was and how to create one, and the next thing I knew we had a
whole “neighborhood” of fact families. The students each
created one family on a “Fact Family House” from the numbers
they were given. The children all are able to identify the two
addition and two subtraction sentences they need to create in
order to make a family, and they did so quickly and excitedly!
Some of the students made 2 or 3 houses! The houses were
decorated and will all be placed on our hallway bulletin board to
create our Fact Family Neighborhood.
We have also been working on telling time to the hour and half
hour on both analog and digital clocks. They have learned the
vocabulary phrases “on the hour” and “half past” and they
understand how to relate analog and digital times. The students
are now very excited to remind me that it is almost time for lunch,
for recess, for PE, and for Art. . . it’s like having 14 little alarm
clocks in the classroom!
Our reading lessons have focused around main idea and
supporting details, and we have been discussing how to predict
what we will be learning during our readings. We learned that
our predictions are largely based on categories of information. If
the title is about whales, we will expect to find whale-related
things such as water, oceans, spouts, splashing, swimming, etc.
The students have learned that we
categorize our ideas all the time without
even realizing we are doing it! How do you organize your kitchen – by
categories! Silverware in one drawer, cups in another, plates in
another, and so on. Categorization takes place everywhere, and we
made “Mystery Categories” with magazine pictures, and the students
had to guess how the pictures were organized. They all had very
unique and clear categories – great work!
Other Classroom News:
Our Character Trait for the month of April is Citizenship. The first, fourth,
and seventh grades put together a short presentation for the school.
The first grade students “presented” a reading from the book “Being a
Good Citizen” by Mary Small. There were volunteers to read the story
as the school watched the book being presented on the large screen. All of the students
helped to read the chorus on each page. They did a wonderful job!