Miss Debbie Murphy 

     Our current religion unit is God’s Son. In the first chapter we will discuss how Jesus helped people. We will also learn about The Great Commandment and how Jesus teaches love. Our final chapter in this unit will focus on prayer.

     We will begin our new math chapter on addition and subtraction strategies this week. We will focus on problem solving strategies such as counting on, counting back, using a number line and fact families.

     Our focus in social studies will be the Pilgrims and their journey from England to America. We will learn about the voyage on the Mayflower and life in America in 1620. Our culminating activity will be a Thanksgiving celebration with the Native Americans (the kindergarteners) to share what we have learned. First graders will dress up as Pilgrim children on November 24^th as part of our celebration. The celebration will be at 9:00 a.m. in our gym.

     In science we are continuing to learn how plants and animals are dependent upon one another to meet their needs.

     In the area of language arts we continue working on grammar, mechanics, usage and vocabulary practice. We continue working with word families and short vowel sounds as our spelling focus. In writer’s workshop we are focusing on writing complete sentences with correct capitalization and punctuation. All of the first graders have been benchmarked for their reading levels. Groups will be reworked as needed. Students will continue reading texts at their current level and working on skills that need reinforcement or extra practice. In addition we continue working on our phonics skills as we have lessons in letter/sound relationships, spelling patterns, high frequency words, word meaning and structure and word-solving actions.