The kids had a bit of a hard time with the last list - climb especially, so I kept those words up for a while and added three new words to that list last week.  how now house   So sorry I hadn't updated that on here.  Those three words were included on the list given out at parent teacher.   This week we're starting fresh with four new words: was saw walk all   Was and saw tend to be difficult words to learn because they have the same letters, just mixed up.  We'll be spending some time on those.  Also, all is a chunk that I noticed 1J has a difficult time spotting in a larger word when they're trying to solve a word they don't know - for example small.  They don't spot the all.  We will be focusing on the all word family this week.

made home goes climb   We're continuing our vowel work this week, focusing on the long vowel sounds again.  For made and home, we will be talking about the magic e on the end that hops back and makes the other vowel say it's own name.  Goes is our two vowels go walking rule that came up last week.  Climb is our tricky word of the week...that silent b is not playing by the rules! 

Something that we're working on daily in Math is applying our skip counting to actual objects. Many of the students in 1J are expert rote counters - they need to be able to count by 2's to 20, 5's to 100 and 10's to 100.  But just because they can count aloud doesn't mean they've made the connection between rote counting and counting groups of objects.  For example, if they're counting how many fingers we have in our class, it makes sense to count by 5's or 10's.  We call it finding the lazy way to count.  Not everyone has made this connection.  If you see an opportunity to count in groups of 2, 5, or 10 - ask your 1Jer to help you out and GO FOR IT!  :)

Words of the week for March 8: let get when hello help yes   We are focusing on the short “e” sound that is in common in all of our words this week.   Please see the Document attached for a complete list of the words we have had up until the week before the March break.