Spelling
Spelling words focused on the ou and ow sound in words. It is tricky to know which one to use sometimes but by the end of the week we got it.
Reading
Students continued pair and group reading of non fiction plant books to gain knowledge about plant parts and plant lifecycles. They used thier knowledge of non fiction text features to look at sections of their book to find the information they were looking for.
Writing
This week's writing piece was a persuasive piece where students shared their opinion and gathered reasons to support that reason. Students chose from school rules, environmental or social topics and drafted, revised and edited before publishing their final piece. Students are very familiar with the writing process now. Our next writing piece will be a report on a Science topic.
Grammar
We did a quick review of using capital letters. The goal for the end of first grade is to have everyone using capital letters for the beginning of sentences, for special names (people and places) and for days of the week, months etc. Parents can encourage their child to use capital letters when they are doing their weekly spelling word sentences.
We finished up our chapter on mental math and it seems as though many students are starting to get the hang of using the mental math strategies to help them with adding and subtracting. We also started a new chapter looking at money. We will use American coins as they are easy to do skip counting with and also add and subtract and later on in second grade fit in with learning fractions. Students can count by 1's with pennies, 5's with nickels, 10's with dimes and 25's with quarters.
We are working on our new unit Past and Present. We reviewed concepts of time that we have already learnt in Math such as telling time and using a calendar. Students were given a small project to do at home - making a timeline of their life and some special events in it.