I am so happy to have your child in my class. This is my 28th year at Jenkins! I have taught every grade level except Kindergarten. Of course, first graders are my favorite!

Monday: Bring new spelling list home and review the words - practice as needed throughout the week. Read nightly to complete the required 100 minutes on the Reading Rocks assignment.

Tuesday-Thursday: Continue to review and prepare for Friday Spelling Test as well as read minutes for Reading Rocks (a total of 100 minutes is required). This can be a combination of the child reading and being read to.

Thursday: Study for Spelling Test and finish Reading Rocks assignment. Return Reading Rocks on Friday.

Friday - begin new Reading Rocks assignment

The first days in First Level are spent assessing and observing the students. I focus on finding where your child is academically so that I can tailor my teaching to his/her needs. Some of the specific reading skills we will be working on are: identifying the roles of the author and illustrator, recognizing simple story structure, making predictions before and during reading, identiying problem and solutions in texts, and becoming aware of important components in retelling a story. On occasion your child will bring home small books that they have read with me in their guided reading group. Please sit with the child and give him/her the opportunity to "show off" how well they can read their book to you. Once the child has had a chance to read the book please be sure it comes back to school so that another can be brought home.

Each week of this nine weeks we will spend time learning about various "word chunks". We will be working on some of the most common word families. The "word chunks" that we will be learning to read and spell this nine weeks are: -op, -ap, -ip, -ot, -at, -it, -in, -an, and -ing in that order. Knowing these word chunks automatically will help the students to be flexible with their writing, reading and spelling.

The first nine weeks I etablished routines for what I epect of writers during our writing workshop. All writing is kept at school in a portfolio so that students always have the opportunity to go back and refer to their previous writing. We will publish class anthologies about every nine weeks. This will be a piece of writing that the student takes completely through the publishing process. These anthologies become part of our classroom library. They are often the most popular books!