Reading

There are many components to our reading program. They consist of phonemic awareness, phonics instruction, dictation, decodable books as well as guided reading. As you can see, reading instruction takes up most of our day.

Phonemic Awareness: This is playing with words. As we move through the thirty lessons, I will let you the specific skill we are working on.

Phonics: This is sound/symbol skills, which you probably know as "sounding out." We will start reviewing the consonants and learning the short vowels first. In first grade, we use the kindergarten letter skills to blend and recognize word families.

Decodable books: These are books that your child will bring home to practice. Each one has a specific sound and spelling. They can be kept in a shoebox.

Dictation: Every phonics lesson has a dictation activity where children use letter sounds to encode (write) rather than decode (read). This an important component to any reading program.

Guided reading: We have reading groups almost every day. During group time, your child will be guided through a leveled book to learn new reading strategies. Leveled books increase in difficulty and learning reading strategies other than blending will help him/her become a good reader. Comprehension is another valuable skilll that is learned in reading group. At the beginning of the year, pictures are very important to the reading. Therefore, please don't cover them up when reading with them.

"Children are made readers on the laps of their parents." — Emilie Buchwald 

Handwriting

We use the progarm called Handwriting Without Tears. It is the same program used in kindergarten and we will be concentrating on the lowercase letters. After the first trimester, we will begin our writing program for the rest of the year.

                 Math

We are very excited to be using a new program called Math Connects. There is a technology piece that you will be able to access at home on the computer. More about this will be coming later as we will be learning more about this brand new program on Sept. 1st.

Science/Social Studies

 We will again be using the magazine Scholastic News to supplement our science and social studies curriculum. We have a newly revised social studies curriculum. More on that later and we have units of studies we do in science throughout the year. They are the following: frogs, butterflies, shadows, push and pull. We also read and discuss lots of nonfiction text to broaden our understanding of our world and community.