St. Christopher School

Happy 2012 to friends old and new!

We are anxious to begin the new year at St. Christopher School!  We will begin learning the long vowel sounds and the rules that go with them.  We continue to work with blends, homophones, opposites and nouns, verbs and adjectives.  Weekly spelling will now consist of 10 words instead of 8. Reading and learning to spell our weekly words is reinforced in the classroom daily and on SpellingCity.com. Our weekly WWW(Word Wall Word ) checkup on Friday now consists of more dictation sentences than individual words.  The class does so well with the sentences! It reinforces listening skills and handwriting !

We will be continuing our addition and subtraction facts and begin groups of tens and ones...place value...in Math.  We will also begin our unit on time and money! Our Math concepts are reinforced with manipulatives used at our desks and virtual manipulatives and games used on the Eno board.

This month 1M and our buddy class 6E will be busy preparing for our Catholic Schools Week mass at the end of the month.  The 6th graders and first graders will work together to do readings, bring up the gifts and be ushers! The school is practicing a beautiful song "Light of the World" to sing together during mass. It will be a wonderful beginning to our Catholic Schools Week celebration. Please save the date for our mass...Monday January30th at 9:15!  We all hope you will join us!

Twas the month of  December in....

Reading! We are starting our second Anthology of stories! We are learning about story genre, characters and settings.  New Word Wall Words are introduced weekly and we read and spell them.  We are talking about homophones and putting them into sentences.  We are learning noun and verb parts of sentences.  All of our reading work is reinforced in our practice book that we do together.

Phonics! We are completing the short vowels and will soon begin the long vowels. Word families are one way we know vowel patterns. If we know cat...we know hat, mat and rat.  Reading the short vowel words in context is practiced together.

Math! Addition and subtraction facts continue to be practiced.  We are learning related facts...2+3=5 and 3+2=5 and Fact Families...4+1=5,1+4=5,5-1=4,5-4=1.Math comprehension problems are read together and solved with drawing the problem out and using manipulatives.

Religion! Advent and Jesus' birth are this month's highlights.  We are also learning ablout the Holy Spirit and the apostles.

Writing! Sentence writing is an important part of Grade 1.  The class is writing 3 to 5 sentences on their own in journaling.  Capitalization, punctuation and sentence structure has been taught and is reinforced when writing.  We are learning about noun and verb parts of sentences in writing and reading.

December brings many exciting events for us!  We shopped with our Grade 6 buddies  on Shopping for Kids day.  We are practicing for our Christmas Music Concert on Dec. 13th.  We made an Advent chain for home.  An Advent candle is colored each Monday on our Advent wreath and each child gets to hang an ornament  on our daily Advent calendar.  I am reading  "The Story of Santa Claus" written by Scribbler Elf and we are finding out how Santa got to live at the North Pole!

Merry Christmas to All...and to All a Good Night! Wishing everyone a wonderful Christmas Season!