The students have established the classroom rules together. Here are their rules, written in the children’s language, as promises.
I promise:
to listen to people, to help people, to do my best work, to keep my hands to myself
Volunteers: I will need help throughout the year both in and out of class. If you would like to help with materials preparation at home, please let me know, as I already have a few things that need to be cut out. There will be many opportunities for you to volunteer to listen to the children read in the classroom, but we need to establish our routines before we are ready for guests!
Footwear: Your child will need a pair of indoor shoes for both gym and classroom wear.
Pencil Box: Please send a plastic pencil box to school to help your child to keep his/her belongings organized.
Schedule: music: Mondays & Wednesdays: Mrs. Draper
library: Wednesdays: Mr. Obst
gym: Thursday & Friday
Show & tell: The children will take turns bringing home the sac magique. They can put objects in the bag to bring to school the next day. We will estimate, count and classify the objects as part of our math program.
Home reading: Please read to your child for pleasure every day. This is the most important thing you can do to help your child succeed in school. Choose books that you both enjoy: library books, family favourites, magazines, etc. It is also important that your child read to you for 10-15 minutes a day. Each evening, your child will also bring home this ziplock bag with his/her home reading in it. Please write the date and the title of the book on the reading log (one line per evening). Please return the ziplock every morning, with everything that came home in it (except letters like this!).
There are three types of work that you will find in the ziplock:
1. A photocopied book or a leveled home reading book: This is all you are starting with this week. If your child is able to simply read the leveled book, great! Listen to him or her read, and lay on the praise! Help him or her learn to use the reading strategies (keys) that will com home in a subsequent letter. If your child can not read the book at all, keep it fun. Have him or her look at the pictures and talk about what he or she sees. Then either read the book to your child (if you speak French). By next week, you will be able to go to my website at and have your child listen to the audio file for the book. The link to my website is in the staff directory on the school website. When listening to the book, have your child follow along in the text pointing to the words (tracking). After listening to the book once or twice, your child may be ready to try to read the book to you. If it is still too difficult, just note on the reading log that the book was difficult and send it back to school. Some books are more challenging because of the vocabulary in them. Simply listening to a book each evening is a great learning activity at the early stages of grade one.
2. Dictée/spelling: Starting next week, your child will bring home 'dictée' words. Each week, some words are related to the phonics of the week, and some words are high-frequency words that the children simply need to learn to write. The list of high-frequency words will be cumulative, so you will see certain words repeat from week to week. The children will practice their dictée words daily in class, so most children will not need much review at home. There will be audio files for each dictée on my website as well, for those of you who do not speak French.
3. Sight-words: Your child will also bring home words on flash cards to practice sight-reading. I am looking for instant recall of these high-frequency (camera key) words. As your child masters each level of sight-words, he or she will get a new level of words to work on. Mastery of sight-words is also cumulative.
4. From time to time, I will send home one of your child's duo-tangs, notebooks or booklets so that you can see what your child is working on in various areas of the curriculum. Your child should be able to re-read this material to you with little or no help. There are no audio files on my website for notebooks and duo-tangs.
Please be sure to send back everything from the ziplock on the next school day! We use it every day!!!
Printing with correct letter formation: I am teaching the children to form their letters properly, beginning with the lower-case letter c and moving on to o, a, d, g and q to get the children in the habit of forming the bubbles of these letters counter-clockwise. We will then move on to the l, t, i, k, z, x, y, w and v. The r, n and m will be taught with the h to get the children used to starting at the top and retracing before forming the hump. The letters s, c, e, b, p, f, j and u will be taught last.
Library books: We encourage the children to choose library books that they can attempt to read, but we understand that this is not always realistic at the beginning of grade one. If you read French, you may choose to read the library book/s to your child. If not, simply look at the pictures together and predict the story. “Reading’ the pictures is an important skill for grade one students to work on. As your grade one child’s skills develop, you may also ask him or her to hunt for high-frequency sight-words or words that are short and easy to sound out. Our book exchange day is Tuesday.
Centres: The children do love their playtime at this age, and they do a lot of their learning through play. The word centres is used for exploration through play, and in my class we have:
• a, b, c centres: to practice pre-reading and reading concepts
• word work (spelling) centres: to practice and play with dictée words
• 1, 2, 3 centres: to practice numeracy skills
• literacy centres to review reading comprehension strategies
• play centres like lego, crafts, puppets, etc.: a reward for good behaviour and hard work at the end of certain days. Any incomplete work gets finished during this time, and students who need extra help on certain concepts receive individual or small group instruction during play centres. If a child has misbehaved three times during the day, the privilege of play centres is lost.
