First Grade News

Dear Families,

This week in Math, students are practicing how to count big numbers quickly. We are using place value blocks (base ten blocks) to count by tens and add on ones. Soon, we will be adding these numbers together! Students are reporting they had a lot of fun playing our subtraction dinosaur games at home. Look out for more games next week!

Our readers are going on adventures in fiction!  Before we dive into a storybook, we remember to take a sneak peek by looking over the cover, title, table of contents, blurb, and inside of the book. We think about who the story is about, where it takes place, and what might happen. We also are keeping up with our characters by noticing when the setting changes and predicting what might happen next as we read. 1st graders are practicing retelling their stories (or what they read so far) after they read by telling about who is in the book, where they are, and a big thing that happened. Retelling is a challenge as it is tempting to tell the whole story.  Please practice this when reading at home and in conversation after seeing a movie.

In writing, we have learned to write interesting introductions to hook our readers and explain to them what our book is about. We used questions, little stories, action words, and big ideas to get our readers hooked!  We also have written conclusions where we are leaving our readers with a big idea, a question to make them think, or repeating information to wrap up our non-fiction book.  We will celebrate our nonfiction writing with our 5th-grade buddies in a couple of weeks!

This week, first graders made matzah with our Carroll Gardens neighbors Rabbi Menashe at Dirah Brooklyn. If any families would like free shmurah matzah they can follow this link! www.dirahbrooklyn.org/matzah Please write Hannah Senesh on the form, and Rabbi Menashe will deliver it.

Shabbat Shalom,

Talia, Liz, and Ilana