First Grade February News
Mrs. Ramoley
Notes &
Important Dates
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One District-One Book Event is Monday, February 3rd at Palos South 6:308:00. Bring your family to play some
games and activities to go along with
our district-wide book The One and
Only Ivan . Information about the
book and the evening is on our district
website as well as the Palos East website.
No School on Friday, February 14th for
Teacher Institute Day.
No school on Monday, February 17th
to celebrate President’s Day.
With the cold weather upon us,
please make sure that your child is
dressed appropriately for outdoor recess! We will have outdoor recess unless the temperature with the wind
chill is 15 degrees or below.
Our Valentine’s Day Party is February 13th.
If you would like to send Valentine cards for
the students, please be sure to
send one card for each child in our
class. Do not send candy or treats
with the cards. Addressing names
on the envelopes is great printing practice!
Room 41
Language
Arts
This month we will continue
Unit 3 stories. Some essential questions we will answer
this month are: What is a folktale? How is life different
than it was long ago? How do we get our food?
 Soft c, soft g, dge
 Long /o/ o_e, long /u/ u_e, long /e/ e_e
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/u/ spelled oo and u (as in book and put)
 Inflections -ed, -ing
 Cause and Effect
 Compare and Contrast
 Folktales
High frequency words as sent home every week on
the . Please practice nightly with your child. Students
are tested on these words every few weeks.
The high frequency words that we will be learning are:
Any, from, happy, once, so, upon,
Ago, boy, girl, how, old, people
After, buy, done, every, soon
BOX TOPS for EDUCATION - Please cut
these off of boxes at home and send
them to school with your child!
6 Traits of Writing
Sentence fluency is an auditory trait. You don’t read fluency; you hear it. You hear
the variety of sentences and the way they play off each other. You hear the music
of figurative language. You hear the ease and readability of the piece. In the classroom,
teachers often have students reread their writing aloud into a whisper phone to check for
sentence completeness and whether or not it “sounds good.”
©Smekens Education Solutions, Inc.
MATH
This month in Math
we will continue working
with the concept of place
value, number stories, and
basic facts. We will investigate place-value concepts for tens and ones
and learn about place-value digit patterns.
We’ll also explore addition of 2-digit numbers
and make up and solve a variety of number
stories, including those with more than and less
than. Also, we will introduce a new routine in
Everyday Math called “What’s My Rule?”.
Please ask your child to ‘teach’ this new routine
to you! In addition to place value, we will continue practicing math facts through the flash
card tests and one-minute written timings. We
hope that your child’s score improves each
time! Keep practicing nightly! When the children practice their facts at home on a regular
basis, it really shows and helps them on both
forms of their timed tests! Thank you for your
continued support.
In social studies, we will be
learning about responsibility. Hopefully,
the students will show understanding of this
by being responsible for such things as their
actions, their schoolwork, their homework,
their library books, their chores at home,
etc.
We will also learn about Abraham
Lincoln and George Washington and the
important contributions they have made.
Science
In Science we are beginning our study of
Reptiles! This is the
third animal class of
five we will be learning. After reptiles we
will begin studying fish.
The characteristics of
an reptiles that the children will need to
know for the test are:
1. Reptiles are cold-blooded.
2. Reptiles have scales on their bodies .
3. Reptiles lay eggs.
4. Reptiles breathe with lungs.
During our study of reptiles, we
will read and write about the different
characteristics. There will be a homework assignment similar to the one that
was completed for amphibians and
mammals at the end of the unit!
Students will also be finishing up
the study of winter in our science binders. Hopefully spring weather is just
around the corner.