Welcome to First Grade! This year will be an action-packed learning year for your child. As the First Grade Team, our goal is to teach each first grader to:

     Be responsible, be the “Boss” of your own body.

     Try your best in every task.

     Share your classroom and school with others

     Be brave! Learn something new every day; don’t give up when the task is too hard at first. Keep trying until you succeed.

     Have fun learning!

We welcome you to check our page often this year as we will update our information weekly to keep you informed as to what is happening in our classrooms. Each first grader will have a binder that we call  B.E.E. BOOKS (Bring Everything Everyday). After Parent Orientation this binder will come home every day to help you know what is happening in first grade. Please be sure to check your child’s B.E.E. BOOK every evening to see what your child is learning and the news of the day. We ask that you make sure that after your child has shared their B.E.E. BOOK with you, it is packed and ready to go back to school the next day.

We invite you to join us on September 15, 2009 at 6:30 p.m. for Parent Orientation. We will be visiting with you about our goals and expectations for your child at this time. We will also give you a B.E.E. BOOK binder for your child. We will explain all the features of the binder and answer any questions that you might have about the binder and our goals for this year.

This year first graders will be busy with:

 Language Arts:

     Reading (letters and sounds, rhyming, guided reading, comprehension)

     Writing (writing complete sentences, learning the types of sentences and how to write for others)

     Penmanship (how to form letters correctly)

 Math:

     Calendar skills (days of the week, months of the year, how to read a calendar).

     Counting skills (counting by 1’s, 2’s, 5’s, and 10’s)

     Patterning

     Graphing

     Addition and subtraction

     Money (penny, nickel, dime, quarter, name and value, and how to count amounts under $1.00)

     Place value (ones, tens, hundreds place)

     Measurement (inches, feet, centimeters, temperature, liquid)

     Simple fractions (half, quarter, thirds, sixths, eights)

     Estimation

     Geometry (shapes)

     Time (to the half hour)

 Social Studies:

     Geography  (types of maps, how to make them, how to read them, weather and how it effects the environment)

     Holidays

     Symbols (flag, Bald Eagle, Liberty Bell, Statue of Liberty)

     American figures (George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King, Columbus, current president)

     U.S. History (Colonists, Native Americans)

     Citizenship (voting, how laws are made, rights and responsibilities of a group)

     Economics (needs and wants of people in our community and in other cultures)

 Science:

     Living and non living

     Animals (needs, life cycle)

     Physical Science (four seasons, weather, temperature)

     Matter (solid, liquid, gas)

     Plants (seeds, parts of a plant, needs of plants)

     Butterflies (needs, life cycle)

 Technology:

     Computer vocabulary

     Keyboarding

     Mouse skills

     Login /logout using user name and password

     Opening / closing / saving a document

     Printing

     Importing pictures

     Special  projects using many components of the computer