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Video from math class on January 8th, 2010.

I apologize for getting behind on informing you about the daily happenings inside of our classroom. I recently purchased a house and decided to do a flip. A lot of late nights and headaches later, we are officially moved in.

This week in Math……

We introduced telling time to the half hour. We have not identified that half past the hour is 30 minutes, so if you have asked your child to show you 8:30, for example, they may be very confused what the 30 means. We will discuss the different minute intervals on a clock later in first grade. At this point we are just discussing “half past” an hour. In addition to expanding our knowledge on telling time, we have introduced problems called “Frames and Arrows.” These problems require students to apply addition and subtraction strategies. For example if a student is giving a problem that has a rule of “+2″ then the student must fill in the frames following the rule. Click here for an example of the frames and arrows problems. Lastly, the students got to practice using Microsoft Access. I am currently pursuing my masters in Technology Integration, and part of my degree required me to implement a lesson with Access. In order to incorporate this into our current math curriculum, students were measured and entered their heights into Access. With this data we were able to sort and find the greatest, and least heights in our class. The next step we took, was to then put all of this data into a tally chart. There were, however, a few issues when typing into Access via the SMARTBoard but with a  few modifications we were able to adjust the lesson to run smoothly.

This week in reading…..

Our focus this week has been the short “i” sound. Our list of spelling words includes many short “i” words. We have also been reviewing parts of a sentence. Our big focus has been that sentences must have a naming part. We will continue to develop this part of understanding sentence construction. The next phase will be discussing the action part of a sentence.We continue to work on building word families. Some of the families we worked on this week were the “-ip”, “-in”, and “-ig” word families. Additionally, we worked on words that end in double consonants. For example ball, all, call are all words that have final double consonants. Lastly, we worked with adding the letter “s” to the end of words to show possession and adding “s” to the end of words to show plurals.

Another Photostory created by the students in Mr. Fenstermaker’s first grade classroom.

Today in class…….

Math

We reviewed patterns on the number grid. We identified patterns when we count by 2’s, 5’s and 10’s. This week in math we have also introduced our math curriculum’s online math game system. Most students will get to play some of the math games online on a daily basis. These games go hand in hand with the concepts that we are currently studying.

Reading

Each week we have a new set of words which we call “high frequency” words. These are words that will appear frequently in our reading. Today we spent some time practicing with these words.

Spelling

This week is our first week of spelling from the curriculum. Previously our spelling tests had consisted of words from a list of 80 Sight Words that was sent home at the beginning of the school year. We will continue to have 3 of those sight words a week but we will also be adding words from our curriculum to the list. This weeks list is focusing on the short “a” sound.

Please come back each and every day to keep informed on the happenings inside of 1F.

Friday, October 1st

Today, we introduced writing stories. Below is a Photostory that we created together as a class. Prior to creating this story we used Kidspiration to map out our story. We focused on having a character, setting, problem and solution. We hope to create a new story each week.

Below you will find the specials schedules.

P.E–Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Gym shoes required.

Music-Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday.

Art-Tuesday

Library/Media–Monday. Books due on Mondays.