The sun is shining and it is a fun filled day here in first grade! We kicked off our day by sharing about what we did last night. This included several mice stories followed by excited boys ready for a weekend of football.  :-)  

We are continuing to move forward with Jolly Phonics each day.  This is the first year I have taught Jolly Phonics so I appreciate you being patient and learning with me. We have finished learning the sounds and have moved on into working with Tricky Words. Your son/daughter should be bringing home a large baggie labeled Tricky Words. Please help your child by reading through these words with them several times each night.  If you feel your child is struggling to recognize these words please feel free to keep the baggie at home for two nights before returning it. I would like these bags to come back each day or every two days. If you keep them at home for longer than that your child will have quite the stack of words to add when the bag does come back.  

Sound bags: these are the small baggies filled with blue words. These are words that your child should be able to sound out and say.  The bags are numbered so that I can keep track of who is taking what home. Your child will bring home every bag at some point in the year. THESE BAGS NEED TO BE RETURNED TO SCHOOL EVERYDAY! I collect these each day and re-assign a new bag to each student who returns them.  In order for your child to get a new bag of words and for other students to get new bags we need ALL bags to come back EVERYDAY!  I know this is a lot to remember and forgetting is not a problem just send it the next day. 

Writing Homework: Mrs. O'Rourke and I chatted early last week and felt like we had a lot of new things going on for Jolly Phonics so we decided to hold off on writing homework until this coming week.  Now that everyone is in the routine of taking and bringing back the Sound Bags and Tricky Word Bags we think we are ready to start the writing homework. We have also re-thought how we want to do this.  The last sound we glued into our sound books was /ar/ on the very next page we drew a green line with a marker. This is going to be where we start our writing homework. We completed list one together this week. We did this so that each student would learn the process of how to do their homework when they are not at school. Please send your child's sound book/writing homework back to school everyday.  

That means...Sound Bags, Tricky Word Bags and Sound Books need to be returned to school everyday.

I have finished checking our Unit 2 Math tests and I must say everyone did an OUTSTANDING job! I was very pleased with the results and you should be proud of your child for doing their very best.  We will continue working with money clocks, simple addition facts and will start looking at patterns on the number line and on the hundreds chart.