Mrs Melissaratos's blog

Dear Parents,
    We concluded our Nursery Rhyme unit this week! The children continued to work on various activities with different nursery rhymes. They also had fun at the end of the week writing and talking about their favorite nursery rhymes with their classmates.
    In phonics, the children had fun playing picture lotto. In this game the children matched pictures of words that had the same ending sounds. We then worked on identifying the beginning and ending sounds of words. Working on identifying these sounds helps children to monitor their reading as well as their spelling of words. We then continued to work on having the children listen to parts in words. The children practiced saying the first and last parts of words. Then they practiced saying the words smoothly. By doing this, the children can analyze the parts of words and then blend them together.

Dear Parents,
    Wow, I can't believe September is almost over! The days are going by so fast!
    This week we began our next unit on Nursery Rhymes. We started out the unit with the story, Each Peach Pear Plum. With this book the children played "I Spy" and looked for different nursery rhyme characters on each page. We also had fun making Humpty Dumptys for the nursery rhyme of Humpty Dumpty and spiders for Little Miss Muffet. The children love this unit because they are familiar with the rhymes and feel successful when they can read them. Throughout this unit we will work on sequencing, vowels sounds, and rhyming.

    We completed our apple unit this week! The children had fun learning about Johnny Appleseed and many of the tall tales that have been written about him. They even thought they saw him walking by our classroom! :)))) This week we also read the story, The Giving Tree. Then the children wrote about things that make them happy. They had some great responses! This week we also read the story, The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree. Then we discussed how trees look different throughout the year. After this, the children drew pictures of trees in the different seasons.

Dear Parents,

    This was a very busy week in First Grade! We continued to get to know each other and also settle into our new routines.
    As a class, we read the book, Mary Wore Her Red Dress. Each child had the opportunity to create a page in the class book that we made after reading the story. We even made our own "big-book" in which the students illustrated a part of this book with a partner. Great Teamwork!

First Grade News
Room 210