October 20 - October 23

 Happy Tuesday--I hope you all had a nice three day weekend!  It was a beautiful day for the Pumpkin Patch.  Afterwards we completed a Pumpkin Life Cycle flip book to reinforce the experience.  

In addition to our field trip today here are this week's happenings:

• Take home books came home today--there will only be two books this week and they are still due on Thursday.  I hope you are having your child read them to your more than once :). 
• The SUU student who comes in to help pass off sight word lists will not be here this week.  We will resume passing off lists next week for Sight Word Soldiers.  Please consider working on these words if you have neglected this--it's very helpful. 
• The PTA fundraiser runs through October 25.  Remember if you just register your child they will receive a jump rope and that I will hand those out privately to students.  We are working towards a class silly string party.  Here's the website again--www.getmovinfundhub.com 
• We have been given permission to hold our Halloween costume parade on Friday, October 30.  Here are the details--students are free to wear a costume that day to school (come dressed in their costume).  Remember that students should not have full masks and stay away from blood and gore. Crowns, hats, face make up, wigs etc. are acceptable.  The parade will be outside.  We (1st and 2nd graded)  will be walking on the inside of the north playground from 2:45-3:00.  Parents can  stand outside the fence around the playground.  Please remember social distancing guidelines :) 
• We have been busy learning!  We are continuing to learn about our body systems.  We have learned about our skeletal, muscular, and digestive systems and will dive into our circulatory and nervous systems this week.  
• In reading we are continuing to learn about long vowel spellings.  We have learned 'ee" spells  /e/ (sound) and a_e and i _e spell the /ae/ and /ie/ sounds.  In addition I am adding in some extra practice on the digraphs sh, ch, and th.  We worked a little bit on /sh/ last week and will add /ch/ this week.  We will especially contrast those two sounds. 
• In math we will continue to work on addition with sums up to 20.  We worked  a lot on counting on to add using "rocks and sticks" and just started adding doubles.  We will start having traditional timed math fact "tests" in class to help with the memorization of these facts.  This chapter shows students many different strategies to "add".  We mostly focus on the counting on strategy as our first graders do not seem to be developmentally ready for the other strategies especially since addition facts are not memorized yet.  We will touch on those strategies but not focus on them.  The other strategies are called "doubles plus and doubles minus one" and "Make a ten".  In doubles plus or double minus one students take a known doubles fact and then add one or subtract one.  Example: 5 + 6 = (5 +5 = 10 so 5 + 5 +1 = 10 as 6 is one more than 5).  You can see the value in the strategy but also how that could be difficult.  The make a ten strategy would be equations such as 9 + 4 = (students take 1 from 4 to make a 10 then solve 10 +3 = 13).  Again you can see this as a helpful strategy  and know that as adults we use this strategy mentally all of the time, but for first graders it will not be  an automatic thing yet.  That's why we introduce it but concentrate more on the counting on method. 
• Remember if you want to order Scholastic books for October the due date is TODAY!  I will extend that until tomorrow just in case you might have forgotten (like I did). 

Have a great Tuesday and Happy Reading,

Mrs. Armstrong