We've made it to the half-way point of the school year!  The next half of this year will be a busy one, as we prepare your child for 2nd grade!  

LANGUAGE ARTS:

Your child is now asked to print both his/her first and last name neatly on each paper using D'Nealian writing.  Please reinforce this on homework assignments.  Also, please check over your child's papers for proper use of capitals and punctuation.  We have been working on this each morning with D.O.L. (Daily Oral Language) sentences as well as during English time.  The students are expected to know how to capitalize the first word in a sentence as well as proper nouns and punctuate the sentence with a period or question mark at the end.  Most of the students are doing a good job with this.

Phonics and reading will become more challenging this quarter. Please encourage your child to listen carefully during phonics time and to ask questions when unsure.  We have moved onto long vowels with silent e at the end.  We will soon be working on the sounds made by ai, ay, ee, e, ea, oa, oe, i, and igh.

MATH:

We will be working on place value, time and money this quarter, so please practice skip counting by 5s, 10s, etc.  We will also talk about greater than/less than and spend a good amount of time working on 2-digit addition and subtraction.  Please review math facts at home whenever possible to boost your child's confidence.

SCIENCE:

As the weather outdoors becomes warmer, we will begin our plant unit.

SOCIAL STUDIES:

We will spend most of this quarter learning about and discussing famous Americans, such as Martin Luther King Jr., Abraham Lincoln, and George Washington.

FYI

This quarter, our students' reading, language, and math skills will be tested through the Terra Nova tests.  Several reading comprehension assignments will be sent home as homework to prepare your child for these tests.  Please do not read these assignments to your child other than to clarify directions.  The students should use their decoding skills to read these assignments and answer on their own.  I am not permitted to help the students in reading these passages, so your help in encouraging independent reading will prove beneficial.