Here's what we've been doing in the classroom:
Reading : We finished up our reading non-fiction unit over the past few weeks. The students learned about many different nonfiction conventions. Nonfiction conventions are things that the authors of nonfiction texts use to organize and share factual information with readers. We went over the table of contents, glossary, index, photographs, labels, captions, maps, cutaways, closeups, and how nonfiction authors use different types of print. As we learned about each convention, the students found examples in their own nonfiction texts and recorded them in their nonfiction convention journals.
After that, we spent some time learning about biographies. The students were very interested in learning about other people's lives and what made them famous. We used a really great website, called PebbleGo, to do most of the students' independent biography reading. Have your child show you all about it at home! If you get your child to the main CHS website, he/she should be able to navigate to PebbleGo from there.
Writing : The students worked very hard on opinion pieces for a few weeks. We used graphic organizers to help the students organize their thinking so that their finished writing pieces would make sense. I'm impressed with how well the students did with this unit, as it's not always easy to give examples to support your opinion in first grade. They did a great job!
After that, we moved on to beginning an autobiography unit. The students are using what they know from reading biographies in reading for the past couple of weeks to structure their own autobiographies.
Math : We worked our way through unit 6, which focused on different strategies to solve addition facts. We went over the 'near-doubles' strategy and the 'making ten' strategy. The students got a lot of practice using each strategy in the classroom, but I don't expect them to successfully use each strategy on their own quite yet. Just like decoding strategies in reading, my goal is to teach the students numerous strategies that they can use to solve math problems. Hopefully the students come across a strategy or two that 'sticks' with them.
After that, we extended the students' knowledge of place value to the hundreds place. Along with that idea, we learned about the dollar bill because it's worth 100 cents. In first grade, the students are only responsible for being able to count pennies, dimes, and dollar bills because they go along with ones, tens, and hundreds. They'll continue learning about the other coins in second grade. Of course, you can go over them will your child at home though.
Science : We moved on in our life science unit to learning about animals and how they have certain body parts to survive where they live. We also started going to our Liberty Science Center lessons, which we will get twice a month for the rest of the year. The students are really enjoying them.
Social Studies : We made our geography unit become more meaningful to the students by working on a Me on the Map project. The students worked through the project one category at a time to locate their exact locations on a world map. From continent, to county, to state, to town, to street, to house number, to bedroom, the students were able to zoom in on where they live.
Here are some pictures :