Language Arts

This past month, the week of glorious CircOrchard reigned supreme. The remaining weeks had the first graders focus on reading and writing about the book Caps for Sale, and about Chinese New Year. Lately, we transitioned into our current curriculum focus: Our Community.

We are welcoming Willow, a student teacher observing and helping out the past couple of weeks.

We also reviewed the Magic C letters with our Magic C game (don’t forget to check your child’s cubby daily-play the game at home with your kids!). The past couple of weeks, we finished introducing the ‘diver’ letters h, b, m, n, r. We are now moving into outlier letters such as f and x.

We started our weekly Helper Posters. We have enjoyed practicing listening and speaking skills, differentiating questions and comments, and learning more about our peers. We also practice writing the helper’s full name.

We have read, retold, and reenacted the engaging tale of a man, his caps, and some monkeys in Caps for Sale. The children designed their own caps, and wrote descriptive sentences about their personalized cap. Stop by the rug room to see them stacked atop the character’s head!

For our Chinese New Year’s celebrations, the children heard the award-winning tales of Lon PoPo and Yeh-Shen, Chinese versions of Little Red Riding Hood, and Cinderella, respectively. We also explored the Chinese zodiac animals. The children heard the tale that determined the animals’ order, and created their own calendars, requiring them to read, write, draw, and organize. Later, they read about each animal signs’ ‘traits.’ They chose one of the traits they felt was most like them, and wrote about that trait, and animal, and themselves.

We are exploring Our Community. We have tallied our home towns, and noted our communal community is Aptos-all being at school in Orchard School. We’ve written about both. We have written a group poem based on the story A House is a House for Me. We’ve generated our list of places in our Aptos community, and are using a graphic organizer to work towards writing a paragraph this upcoming week. Thanks to Clover helping on Thursdays, we have painted our cardboard roads of Soquel Drive and Trout Gulch Road. This week, we will begin to place our buildings worked on at home along our 3-D map! We will end the week and the unit with a trip to the Aptos Fire Station. Please let me know if you can drive.

Graphic organizer to..... 

Our first paragraph!