February

During reading this month, we began learning how to summarize a book. We talked about including the important information from a text in our summary. Students worked in pairs and alone to summarize different pieces of text. This is a hard topic for most of the students to grasp. We are still working on summarizing our own stories during our class sharing time instead of telling every little detail that happened. One way you could help your child practice summarizing is to ask him to summarize his school day. Remind them to include the important information and leave out extra details.

The students also practiced inferring and predicting. This topic will carry into March. We read a book together and then make predictions about what will happen next based on the information we have already read.

We have been working on book reviews during our writing time. The students have used a variety of outlines to write book reviews. They are finishing up editing one of those reviews and publishing it online. You can find some of the published book reviews on: http://teacher.scholastic.com/activities/swyar/browseGrade.asp?grade=1. Ask your child what book she wrote a review over and see if you can find her published work!

 

We also spent some time in the library researching different animals. Students researched an animal and wrote down interesting facts about that animal. Their work is displayed in the library!

 



The topic for math this month was challenging across all of first grade. We were learning about adding to 40 and adding and subtracting with regrouping. Please keep in mind that this was the first time the students have been introduced to the concept of regrouping. We will continue to practice it throughout the rest of the year.

We played a game with marshmallows and pretzel sticks to practice regrouping.