Media Center

School management Team Notes/ September 2006

First grade has had a busy start! We are assessing all students in reading using the fall benchmark assessments from the county on our palm pilots. We will look at this data to determine reading groups. We will begin reading groups in the next week as we finish the assessments! In Reading, we have been working on making connections to literature, before, during, and after reading strategies, and retelling a story. We will begin looking at story elements such as characters, setting, problem, and solution. We focused on books by Kevin Henkes at the beginning of the school year, and have retold stories such as The Napping House, Caps For Sale, Mariana May and Nursey, and The Carrot Seed. We are working on rhyming words and beginning and ending sounds. In Writing, we have worked on spaces between words, using capitals at the beginning of a sentence, using the word “I”, making sure our pictures match the text, and how to use a return sweep to write when we run out of space. During this writer’s workshop time daily we encourage first graders to write the sounds that they hear, and to use the word wall for common sight words. In Math, we have pre-assessed for Unit one and are learning addition and subtraction. We hope to use data from math assessments to determine needs. We will invite students to “lunch math” on Tuesdays to reinforce math concepts that need reteaching. We hope to begin this “Lunch Math” program the first week of October. We have started our first science unit on Constructions. The students have learned that we build things out of different materials and we have sorted materials. In Social Studies, we have made classroom rules and talked about why we have rules. We have also discussed the jobs that students, parents, and teachers have to work together for a successful school year. This is the start of a new social studies curriculum for first grade. We are off to a running start!

Maintained by Joy McIntyre (Joy_A_McIntyre@mcpsmd.org)