The month of December has arrived and your child began the month by creating a countdown to Christmas on Friday. Hopefully they're keeping up with the fun and strengthening their counting backwards thinking. We have been working on missing addends in math and, as you know it helps them to understand the operation of subtraction in and addition problem. The inverse thinking also shows the relationship between fact families such as 3,4 and 7. So...... 4+3=7, 3+4=7; 7-3=4, 7-4=3; 3+_-7 & _+4=7. We're working on flexibility and the comprehension part of recognizing whether to add or subtract on each problem to be solved.
This skill also transfers to multiplication (repeated addition) and division as they take on more ability to recognize other operations.
I have discovered a new on-line math opportunity that is free. You can register as a parent for your child and then have the opportunity to have extra practice on numerous skills throughout the basic math curriculum that meets them where they are, scores their progress and continues to challenge them all at the same time. Please refer to this web-address and proceed with registration, at which time you will be given a confirmation password to use each time your child logs in to the site. I highly recommend this, as it is paperless, keeps the data as to where your child is progressing and moves them through the 'next steps'. Register for Brainish here: http://www.brainish.com/Registration/tabid/53/Default.aspx Good luck and of course, you can have your child participate if you choose to :-).
We are participating in a worldwide Holiday Card Exchange for the next three weeks. We will be receiving 24 holiday cards from different schools all over the United States. We took pictures for the cards on Friday, and hope to be creating, finalizing and sending our cards to their destinations on Wednesday. It should be exciting to receive these and each time we do, we'll virtually 'visit' the school from where it was sent through using Google Earth on the SMARTboard. How exciting, so you'll be hearing about this throughout the next three weeks. If you have a family member deployed, please encourage them to send a card to the class as well. Our small bulletin board will hold the evidence of all the cards received and the more we get, the more we'll post. Thanks for letting your kids hear from their deployed parent through this holiday card project.
We will be preparing another Reader's Theatre for the month of December and they're very excited about it, once again. I was so pleased with their efforts on the Thanksgiving Reader's Theatre performance. We travelled to all the other first grade classrooms, and Mrs. Avermann's speech classroom to perform and practice our presentation skills. Many students had their parts memorized. They never cease to amaze me in what they're able to do.
We'll be decorating our gingerbread (graham cracker) houses this week. They always turn out so adorable, so we'll wait to see how their writing project turns out. We will be working on organizing our writing, before writing this month, which includes sequencing, main idea, and supporting details, with a closing statement. Written language is closely associated with spoken language and experiences provided to them to produce interesting samples. Their handwriting, spelling, mechanics and grammar are improving in their authentic writing. We will be editing and publishing these outside our classroom. It should be fun and worthwhile.
Once again, thank you so much for your continued support and work with your child.
Enjoy the new slide show posted below!
Happy December,
Mrs. Petty
