The Last week in First grade!

June 1-5

Wow!  This year has flown by! Thank you for sharing your children with me this year.  We've done a ton of learning and living together in this classroom!  We learned to be patient with each other and listen to everyone!  

REMINDERS

Monday: First grade award assembly 8-9
Tuesday: Tuesday folders will come home- Please keep it at home!
Thursday: End of the year Party- Parents are welcome! 10:30-12:30 Lunch afterward!
Friday: Last day of school.  Report cards will be sent home.


THIS SUMMER
Research has proved that students almost forget seventy percent of what they have learned over the summer.  We worked hard this year and it would be the best if the children continue to practice during the summer in order to have a good start to second grade. Here are some suggestions for reading, writing and math.

SUMMER READING

Public Library

Visit the public library regularly over the summer to check out  books that your child are interested in. Please make this as a regular schedule at least once a week so that your child will always have plenty of good books to read.

MakinVIA 

You can access this website through our school website.
http://www.mackinvia.com

Caraway Elementary
User ID: Letter "s" and the 6 digit student Id number
Password: Via

RAZ Kids
You can access this through our class blog. 
username was sent home a few months ago.  If you don't remember it, please let me know. In Razkids, each book comes with a set of reading comprehension quizzes.  Please be sure your child take those quizzes before moving to the next book. 


Bookflix, Tumble books, Pebble Go
Please check your child's daily folder for login information for these resources. Your child can access all these resources during the summer and read a variety of fiction and non-fiction books.

SUMMER WRITING

This week the children will bring a summer journal home.  Please encourage your child to write for 10-15 minutes each day. They could write small moments (personal narratives), poetry, non-fiction/true facts, stories, or just about all the fun and adventures they have during the summer. When writing, please go over the writing conventions such as starting sentences with capital letters, putting correct punctuation at the end, and leaving spaces between the words.  The 100 first grade sight words must be spelled correctly and a copy is attached to the summer journal.  You can also find a copy in the daily folder. 

MATH
To review and sharpen some of the math skills we learned this year, I would recommend a math activity book called "180 days in math", for first grade or second grade if your child is more advanced. This book can be purchased at Barnes and Noble or on line. Please refer to your child's math journal for ideas regarding math word problems.  The math journals will be sent home on Monday.

IXL math: Please have your child continue working on IXL math over the summer. You will need to access the site through school website. The login information were sent home at the beginning of the year.  I also send their laminated computer lab cards home on Friday.  Please let me know if you have trouble logging in.


 In addition, please set aside time for playing board games, going to the park, swimming, bike riding, helping with chores around the house, and some fun play date times.  Enjoy your time as a family! I can't wait to see everyone next year in the halls!

Food Drive Message

This week in First grade...

May 18-22

Thanks to everyone who supported our school by coming to the Book Fair!  Our Caraway Library raises money during the book fair so Mrs. Letendre can purchase exciting, new books to have for our students to check out in the Library!

Yesterday I was out at a Leadership Retreat with our Academic Leadership Team at IBM.  We got a personal tour of the new Mobile Lab and heard all about the wonderful advances in technology that IBM engineers!  Our goal is to produce the future workforce of Texas and keep our students current on 21st century skills!

VOLUNTEER APPRECIATION DAY
We are very excited to celebrate our wonderful volunteers this year!


 REMINDERS

Tuesday:  Tuesday folders come home.  Please sign and return it the next day.  Thank you!
Wednesday: 
Thursday: Volunteer Appreciation Day!
Friday: Classroom Library will close for inventory.  Please allow your child to bring 3-5 books from home to keep in his/her book box.  

Parent Input form:  There is a link on the Caraway Website to give input about your child for next school year.  Click here to go to the form. 

School Supplies: There is also a link to the Caraway Website for ordering School Supplies for the 2015-2016 School Year.  All orders will be online.  Click here to go to the website.

READING and WRITING
    We will continue our family writing.  I can't wait to share their writing with you.  I hope you are as entertained by them as I have been.  After finishing our family writing, we will start working on our first grade memory books.  We will remember all the great things that we did in first grade and write about those things. As always, we will emphasize on neat writing along with correct capitalization, punctuation, and sentence structure.    
     In reading we began the sequel to The Name of this Book is Secret (Secret Series #1).  The title of our new book (Secret Series #2) is If your Reading This it's Too Late.  These fiction books reinforce the comprehension skills and strategies we've learned this year.  It also helps get first graders interested in reading chapter books over the summer!  We will use the picture clues as well as the text clues to make predictions and inferences, visualize a part of the story or make connections. 

MATH
For the next few weeks, we will work hard on problem solving.  We will review the steps of how to start the problem solving and work on different strategies that have been learning throughout the year.  Reading a math problem is like reading a story.  We need to visualize it first by drawing a relevant picture.  We need to remember the important things by underlining them, and we need to show our steps and strategies such as using a number line, ten blocks and ones, tally marks, and addition and subtraction sentences.  Whatever strategy we  use, we also need to write our thinking in words.  These steps will help the children in the long run to do more advanced problem solving in higher grades.


SOCIAL STUDIES
We will continue our unit on economics.  The children have been learning about goods and services and how some jobs produce, or make goods and other jobs provide a service.  We all need money to satisfy our needs and wants, and in order to gain money we need to have jobs.  But we also need to make wise choices and be smart about spending our money.  We will also learn about scarcity problem, when we have unlimited wants and needs and limited resources.