swans

Welcome to the Swan Class

***Do not forget if you see a swan, pass the information along! Our class needs more representation of our difficult to locate mascot! ***

Announcements

Hello Swan Family,

Have fun exploring our webpage as I hope you are able to find helpful information and links to increase the success of your student in first grade. Feel free to e-mail me with your topics, interest, and ideas to make our page not only enjoyable but relevant.

Students have recently been reassessed on their High Frequency Words; please continue to practice these words with your students. HF Words should b know at sight and correctly identified within 3 seconds without using the decoding process. I sent home a copy of First Grade High Frequency Words at the beginning of the school year, if you need another copy please send the request via your students HW folder.

We are having a very low participation rate with our Monthly Reading Logs. On average 2-3 students per month are returning the logs indicating that they are reading each night for at least 20 minutes. Research indicates that the more frequently a student reads, the greater their overall chances are in successfully manipulating text. Please encourage your students to read daily and reinforce the concept of a literacy enriched home by completing the logs and returning them accordingly.

Do not forget to support our PTO and display your McNair pride by purchasing school shirts and accessories! Fridays are McNair Wear days! Please submit your order forms and payments via your students HW folder. You may also see PTO personnel or the hall display for further information.

Look What We Can Do

We are approaching the end of our 3^rd academic quarter and the students are working diligent to master all of the First Grade skills required to become successful 2^nd Graders. We are learning many new concepts and revisiting old ones to assist in building a solid academic foundation.

In Reading/LA we will continue to read to increase fluency and comprehension. A way to support this concept at home would be to complete each reading by having the student retell the story in their own words. Summarizing to include identifying the Main Idea and Details, Plot, Characters and their traits, Problem and Solution, and Setting are concepts that we will utilize throughout the year.

In Math we are exploring probability with respect to equally likely, likely, unlikely, possible, and impossible; we will also revisit concepts of data and time. Before the quarter ends we will have covered capacity and weight, too!

Wish List

Do you have a few moments to spare? Contact me about a day and time that you would like to experience how well the Swan students are reading. Our class has made such progress since the beginning of the year and would love to demonstrate it to you personally.

Week’s Words

Please study and review the following word patterns in the upcoming weeks. A great activity would be to have students write as many words as possible with the particular word family, then either constructing flash cards or locating the words in the dictionary.

Upcoming Week’s Words Families

-ow as in snow, -oa as is goat, -oo as in good, and –y (/e/) as in baby

Wonderful Websites

The links below are provided for parents and their children to review skills taught at school. These links will take you away from this DoDEA site. Providing these links to parents should not be considered and is not a government endorsement. The teacher will check these links periodically to make sure they work and are going to the sites they feel are appropriate for their students.

High Frequency Words

http://www.sightwordswithsamson.com

Phonics, Grammar, Sentence Structure

http://www.roythezebra.com

Math Skills Support

http://resources.oswego.org/games/

Other Great Sites:
http://www.seussville.com/lb/playground.html

www.kidshealth.com

www.sciencemonster.com

www.funbrain.com

www.starfall.com

www.literactiv.com