Welcome to Grade One! I am really excited to have the opportunity to work with both you and your child this school year! So far I have received the warmest of welcomes from your children and I am having a really lovely week.
In terms of curricular goals and expectations, I will outline some of the areas I aim to cover this school year.
Reading and writing are extremely important skills to develop early on in a child’s life, and in Grade One, we will be focusing intensely on these two skills. Throughout the school year, your child will be engaged in various opportunities to develop reading fluency, decoding skills and develop important writing skills. We will also work on phonics, basic grammar such as periods, capital letters and nouns. We will also begin to work at spelling in Grade 1.
Students will learn many new concepts in math this year. Some topics that we will cover include: recognizing and continuing patterns; counting orally to 100 by 1’s, 5’s, 10’s, and 2’s; learning about probability; addition and subtraction to 20; identifying and naming 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional objects; measurement using standard and non-standard units; and money.
Our CISVA theme this year is “I Can Do All Things Through Christ.” I encourage each child to walk with confidence and resilience in their everyday lives. In addition to this theme, our Religion program will also encompass: discovering Jesus as our friend; learning about the holy seasons of Advent and Lent; learning how God is our Good Shepherd; and understanding that we are called to be Jesus’ disciples.
In the science curriculum, we will learn many different concepts such as: discovering the seasons and how they differ; distinguishing the characteristics of living and non-living things and their basic needs; learning about objects in the sky; the properties of light and sound; and matter.
The Grade One socials curriculum includes: rights and responsibilities of the students’ in school and others in the community; diversity within the classroom and around our community; and the First Nations peoples.
REMINDERS
Expectations: The Grade One’s have agreed upon a set of rules, which are now posted in the classroom. I believe that the development of rules at an early stage is important to provide consistency in the students’ day to day experience. One of our big rules is ‘‘We keep our hands, our feet and our comments to ourselves. If we have nothing nice to say we say nothing at all’’.
Homework: It is expected that students are to read with, and to their parents for about 15 minutes each day. For the Home Reading program, the students will read one book to you, and write a simple statement about that book. (eg. I liked the book because the clown was funny.) Students will be required to read and write their statement about the book and return the book and their Home Reading duotang each day including Friday.
Routines: Book Exchange will take place every Thursday, so please ensure that all school library books are brought back by this day. Library books can be dropped off in our blue library box in the Grade One classroom. Gym is on Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. Please have your child’s gym strip underneath his/her school uniform on these days, as students change for gym in the classroom. Please practice dressing and folding with your child. This is the first year that they change in school. I aim to foster independence and encourage the children to dress, and fold their clothes themselves. Please label all items of uniform with black permanent marker. The children are responsible for their own clothing. Also, please ensure that your child has proper gym shoes that he/she leaves here in his/her gym mesh bag on his/her cloakroom hook.