Thirteenth Day of School

You should find your child's math test in their backpack. I sent the new lesson's homework home. I told them it was optional. I will correct and record it on Tuesday if your child decides to turn it in.

Please remember that Tuesday is a regular dismissal schedule (2:04).

Some students will be able to retell to you events of Alexander Graham Bell's early life (his deaf mother taught him how to play piano, he tried to invent a talking machine, and one that would make his dog speak), young adult life (he taught deaf students how to talk), and later life (he collaborated with Thomas Watson to invent the telephone, he made it possible to talk across the U.S.).

Some students may also recall traditions from other countries regarding what children do with their baby teeth.

Topic 2 Math Test

Twenty Students of the 24 taking the test passed with a score of 13 pts. (72% adjusted) or more. High score was 25 pts. Seven students scored 20 pts. or higher. The modal score was 21.

Again, it took the class much longer to take the test than usual. There was not enough time remaining to start topic 3. I sent the topic introduction activities home for home study. It does not need to be returned.

Start Smart Conclusion

This week we will continue to review more sounds and letter formation. All students have been assessed in oral phonics skills and sight word reading. We have begun our Unit Project. We will be authoring a book entitled All About (name of student). We will continue work on this project over the next 2 weeks.

Tomorrow we will participate in our first VAPA (district) drama lesson with Ms. Jordahl.

Reminders and Notes

The PearsonSuccessNet access code was sent home today with your child.

Our second math test will be on Wednesday.

The first reading log is due on Thursday.

Instructions For Math Program Registration PearsonSuccessNet

In order to complete the registration process, a registration code is necessary which I will be sending home this week.

First time users: 
To register in SuccessNet:

1. Go to www.pearsonsuccessnet.com
2. Click Register
3. On the first screen, type the class access code above in the access code field.
4. Follow the instructions to register.Please DO NOT use your full name as your user name.
   Write your user name on the blank line above exactly as you typed it.
5. At the end of registration process, the SuccessNet login page appears.
6. Log in by typing your user name and password.

Existing users:
To enroll in this class:

1. Go to www.pearsonsuccessnet.com.
2. Log in by typing your existing user name and password.
3. From your Home Page, click My Account.
4. Click Add Class/Group
5. Follow the instructions, and use the class access code above to enroll in this class or group.

Topic 1 Math Test

The scores for our topic 1 math test were a bit underwhelming this year. I was surprised at some students' performances. With an adjusted score for the difficulty of some items 21 students passed with a score of 14 or better of the 23 students present to take the test. The high score was 22.

Tests will be returned tomorrow.

Seventh Day of School

We took our 1st topic math test today. We ran out of time to begin our next Math topic so we will now be behind. There is no need to return tonight's "homework" (the topic 2 preview game sheet) so students will not be turning in homework tomorrow.

I acknowledged one student's homework today in class who actually correctly answered the open response question. The students were supposed to write a problem for the picture of the 3 dogs and the 2 bones. A best answer response would have been: "How many more dogs than bones are there?" or "How many dogs will not get a bone?" An incorrect response would have been to suggest adding the number of dogs to the number of bones. This will be an important idea for later topic concepts. If there are 3 apples and 2 oranges, one doesn't ask: "How many are there altogether?", but rather: "How many fruit are there altogether?" So to extend the idea to algebraic terms, 3A + 2O does not equal 5AO.

We reviewed the Golden Rule in class today. It may be a good idea to review the principle at home for continuity. I was very surprised to learn how many children were unfamiliar with this concept.

It is not necessary for students to bring their reading log to school each day. I will review them all on the last school day of the month.

Conversation starter: We heard the story Aunt Minnie and the Twister. All students should be able to relate what happened to Aunt Millie's house. A high producing student should be able to define the term setting and tell what the setting of the story was (springtime on a farm in Kansas), who the main characters were (Aunt Minnie and the children), the middle of the story (a tornado), and the end (the house was turned around to face the johnny house so Aunt Minnie had a new front built for the back of the house). They should also be able to distinguish the genre (realistic fiction) from that of a folktale.

Students really should be wearing a shoe substantial enough to require socks. That is to say, socks should be worn every day to school. Shoes for school in 1st grade are not fashion statements but rather functional items to protect feet comfortably.

Start Smart Week 2 Preview

The next 5 days of instruction will be our 2nd week of Language Arts review. We will continue with sound spelling card review, proper letter formation as well as isolation of initial and final phonemes, and syllable segmentation. We will continue with rhyme identification and begin rhyme generation. Last week we briefly reviewed sequence of events as a strategy for analyzing story structure. This week we will briefly reintroduce the concepts of beginning, middle, and end of a narrative piece.

We will have our first topic test in Math on Wednesday. Look for test results to be posted towards the end of the week. We will begin the study of our second topic (time permitting) on Wednesday, comparing and ordering numbers. This topic reviews the ideas of 'greater than' and 'less than'. This is a short topic which means we will have our second Math test next week.

We will continue our introductory lessons of our violence prevention (Second Step) program. We are on our 3rd lesson. We are learning how to identify emotions based on observation in order to make it easier to foster friendships.

We will continue with last week's PE concepts and add spacial awareness and boundary recognition.

Home Activity Suggestion 1

Every week have each member of the family keep an eye out for something they would want to read aloud to the rest of the family. This item might be a limerick, fortune cookie, greeting card, comic strip, etc. Physical pieces might even be saved in a scrapbook type collection over the year.

Back-To-School Addendum

It was very to nice to meet all of the concerned parents at Back-To-School Night last night. I hope you felt the time was well spent. Please feel free to use the comment section to add further questions or to let me know if there was some information you felt was especially helpful, surprising, or maybe something that was left out.

Speaking of things left out, a few things I forgot:

1) If you will recall when I was speaking about our math program and some of the methods we will use to learn our new concepts, I forgot that I was also going to tell you about a recurring theme which will show up in a variety of math tests this year. Your child will be asked often to explain how they know that a particular answer is correct. For example, if your child makes that claim that 7 + 5 = 12. A perfectly acceptable way to show that they know this is true is to use inverse operations. Since the inverse operation of addition is subtraction, your child may simply assert that they know 7 + 5 = 12 because 12 - 5 = 7.

2) A further math heads-up is that children in 1st grade are expected to learn to tell time to the half-hour and to count and identify pennies, nickels, dimes, and half dollars.

3) A couple of special days I failed to mention are of course Halloween and Valentine's Day. We will not be sharing any special treats on Halloween. We will have a Halloween parade to show off our costumes in the afternoon. Children are expected to bring their costume in a bag and will change after lunch. I would very much appreciate assistance in the putting on of costumes, in fact, I try to stay out of the way as much as possible for this activity. Girls change in room 8 with Mrs. Ramirez. Boys change in room 11 with my parent volunteers. For Valentine's Day, we will share treats and trade our special this and that's and we just love Valentine's Day in 1st grade.

Start Smart Week 1 Preview

In our first unit of learning we will explore some of the things that make people unique. This week we will look at the characteristics of ourselves and others that make us special. Within this idea we will review the simple elegance of the Golden Rule for our Social Science lesson as we reinforce the importance of respecting the differences we discover in others (HSS 1.1.2).

For the first 3 weeks in Language Arts, we will review many of the concepts learned in Kindergarten. We will review the Kindergarten sight words as well as letter sounds and proper writing formation. We will also review rhyme and syllable segmentation. We will be reintroduced to our first thinking maps, the Circle Map and the Bubble Map as we learn how to describe ourselves in order to begin our first theme project: a book about ourselves.

In Math we will review number sense concepts emphasizing visual patterns and ideas for the numbers 0-12.

In Music we will discuss pitch and rhythm.

In PE we will focus on balance and cooperation.

Welcome to Room 11

This blog has been created to keep parents and guardians of the students in room 11 at Caroldale Learning Community informed about daily activities in our classroom and school. Please discuss what you read here with your children when appropriate. Ask them clarifying questions. They don't necessarily need to know how you know what happened during their day, they should simply know that you are informed. Feel free to  respond to what you read. Please remember the most efficient way to communicate with me on timely issues is to write a note on or attached to your child's homework. Try to avoid including students' names when responding to posts. General comments and questions are best in this arena. For convenience, you might consider linking to this page through an rss feed or through the google reader application.

Thank you,

Mr. B