Tidbits for the Year in Room 205:

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1 Dear Families, Tidbits for the Year in Room 205: Greetings from room 205, where your child will be eagerly learning so many fun and new things! I am looking forward to a wonderful new school year with your child. September will be very exciting as we spend the month building our classroom learning community, learning first grade procedures and expectations. We will be reviewing good reading habits, number sense, monarchs, and bus safety. I hope the following tidbits can give you some insight into some of our classroom procedures. Please feel free to contact me with any questions you have now or throughout the year! Communication hradzak@cambridge.k12.mn.us Phone: The best time to call is before school, after school and from 2:00-2:40. Website: Checkout our classroom website for our schedule, the weekly newsletter, pictures from our classroom and links to other websites for you to practice learning at home! Newsletter: A weekly newsletter will come home the last day of each week, giving you a glance ahead to the upcoming week. Please post the newsletter someplace where both your family and your child can refer to it. It will include specials, homework reminders, important reminders, upcoming classroom, and school events. It will also be posted on our classroom website. Take-Home Binder: Each day your child will bring home a Take-Home Binder containing important papers from school to share with you. You may use this binder to carry notes and papers back to me! Please check it nightly. Absence: If your child is absent, please be sure to call the attendance line. That number is After School: Please send a note or call our classroom and leave a message if there is going to be a change in your child s after school routine. If you are picking your child up from school, please pick them up at the Parent Pick-Up area located at the corner of the Primary School by the car lane.

2 Morning Meeting Each morning, at the start of our day, students will participate in a daily community meeting. The structure of Morning Meeting consists of four components: 1. Morning Greeting: This is where each student is greeted by their classmates, usually in a fun handshake, foreign language, or game format. 2. Sharing: Each day, students will have the opportunity to share, develop, and practice skills of caring communication and to learn more about each other. Sharing can be around the circle, with a partner, or with one person sharing to the whole group. Students will learn how to ask good questions and make meaningful comments. Student will be sharing events from their life, not objects like Show and Tell. 3. Activity: The kids LOVE this! We play a game to build community by practicing cooperation, responsibility, empathy, and self-control while getting to know one another or practice current math or reading skills. Each day, we play something new or play a favorite we have already learned. 4. Morning Message: This is when we use our SMART board (interactive whiteboard computer) to read a message from Mrs. Radzak transitioning from morning meeting to the rest of our day, getting students excited about what they ll be learning! Reading We will learn to read and become more fluent and independent readers this year. This includes indepth phonics instruction, as well as many other types of language experiences. Learning to read is a cooperative effort between home and school, involving the child, parent and teacher. Your child s success is very dependent on each person doing their part. Your part, as a parent, is to make sure that you read with your child for at least 15 minutes every day. Reading Street / Guided Reading / Daily 5 / CAFÉ are all components of our reading block. Reading Street is our reading curriculum providing us with our phonics focus, literature elements, and weekly story. Guided Reading is a teaching strategy where students meet in small groups with me working with books at their reading level. Daily 5 is a structure providing options for students to work on when not meeting with me. The Daily 5 options are Read to Self, Read to Someone, Listening to Reading, Work on Writing, and Word Work. CAFÉ is a menu of reading strategies that students will learn through this school year to support them in becoming independent readers. Sight Words (Words I Can Read) will be coming home weekly on Mondays. These words are high frequency words. Review the sight words with your child throughout the week. Your child may have a word ring they keep in their Book Pocket to use for additional practice with these words. In our weekly newsletter, there will be a new idea your child may use to help master these words.

3 Spelling Words (Words I Can Spell) will be coming home weekly on Mondays beginning in October. Each week students will have a Spelling Pre-Test on Mondays and Final Tests on Fridays to build their understanding and application of the weekly phonics skills. For students who master the initial ten spelling words, our Weekly Sight Words will be the Challenge List. Spelling Words are to be practiced at both home and school. Book Pockets, found in student s Take-Home Binders, will contain guided reading books and the First Grade Reading Calendar beginning in October. It is your first grader s responsibility to read these books at home and return them to their Book Pockets nightly. More information will come home about each of those pieces, as it gets closer. Thank you for your dedication. Together, we will help your child practice to become a better reader. Scholastic Book Orders will be sent home once a month. There are many great deals on children s classic books. If you would like to purchase a book for your child, you can chose to place the order on-line (earning our classroom new books) or by sending a check made out to Scholastic Books along with the order slip found on the last page back to school. The due date of the order, usually one week after it is sent home, will be posted in the newsletter. Books make fantastic gifts! If you would like to purchase a book as a gift for a birthday or holiday, please let me know. I will enclose your order in an envelope and send it home taped and sealed with your child, to keep it secret. If you have any questions feel free to contact me. Math In first grade, we work hard to build a strong foundation of number sense. We build each week on previously learned skills. Skip counting, addition and subtraction strategies, number writing, place value, telling time, and measurement are just a few of the things we will be working on. Everyday Mathematics is our math curriculum containing a spiraled format for building foundational mathematics skills. This provides students with a deep understanding of number sense, which will support students success as skills build in math each year. With our curriculum, there will be Math Homelinks that will come home almost daily. The purpose of the Math Homelinks are to inform parents of the skills we are learning as well as provide your student with practice to reinforce these skills at home. The Homelinks will not be graded but please return them when completed. I will keep you up to date on what skills we are working on in the weekly newsletter. Estimation Jar Each week, students have a chance to guess how many objects are in our estimation jar. On Friday, we count how many objects are in the jar, and the student with the closest estimation will take a Ziploc bag with a note home over the weekend. That student will be responsible for returning the bag by Tuesday so we can refill our jar with something new for the next week. Ideas for the estimation jar include cereal, noodles, marshmallows, legos, rocks, candy, cotton balls, pennies, or whatever else you and your child come up with! It is a lot of fun and a great way to work on math skills!

4 Specials Our specials schedule is based on a Monday-Friday rotation. Our schedule is as follows: Monday: Gym Tuesday: Music Wednesday: Media Thursday: Gym Friday: Art Please remember to have separate gym shoes for your child to keep in his/her locker. Your child will be bringing home library books to read with you. Reading with an adult is very nurturing to children and help improve their reading development. Please remember to send books back to school on the day we have library so he/she may check out a new book. Birthdays Birthdays will be celebrated! If your child has a summer birthday, we will celebrate their half birthday. Your child will receive a birthday crown, birthday pencil, and a class performance of Happy Birthday sung to them! When your child celebrates their birthday, they may choose to bring in treats, but this is not required. Treats must be store bought and here ready for snack time. Summer birthdays will be celebrated on your child s half birthday. (June Birthdays in December, July Birthdays in January, August Birthdays in February) First Grade O.W.L. The First Grade O.W.L. (First Grade Outstanding Weekly Learner) is the room 205 version of a star student. The week before your child s First Grade O.W.L. week, I will send home with them a Who Am I? poster an a Me Sack. Please take the time to sit down with your child to complete and color the poster that will be hung in the classroom for the week. Be creative!!! You may use small pictures as well as drawings. For the Me Sack, please bring 2 items that tell about your child. The items can be pictures, toys, items from their room, an award or trophy, etc. **Please send the poster and Me Sack to school with your child either before or on Monday of his/her special week.** More details will be sent home before your child s week. The Importance of Breakfast and Snack Time We have a snack time each day. Please send a healthy snack each day, and make sure they eat breakfast each morning. I understand that we have some children who have to get up early to catch their bus, and breakfast at that time may not be appealing, or forgotten in the hustle and bustle. Any child may attend the school breakfast program when he/she gets to school and the cost will be taken off of your family s prepaid school account. Full tummies help us to work our hardest and do our best! Water bottles are also encouraged at school to keep brains hydrated! School Pictures SEPTEMBER 30 th IS FALL PICTURE DAY! Fall pictures are taken mainly for student records. Casual pose picture packages will be taken in the spring, which you can see before you have to pay. Spring pictures will be taken March 17 th.

5 Help Wanted! As we start the year, I would like to extend an invitation into our classroom to volunteer. I am looking for weekly volunteers as well as volunteers who may have a day off and would like to come in and experience our first grade happenings. I am in need of volunteers to listen to students read, help with art projects, do clerical jobs, etc. Please return the volunteer form if you are interested Beginning of the Year Forms Enclosed with this letter in the Take-Home Binder, you will find a class schedule, First Grade O.W.L. schedule, our first Weekly Newsletter, a classroom contact magnet, a volunteer form, and most importantly, the First Grade Handbook with forms that need to be returned. This year the CPS handbook is available online at the CPS website. Please use the checklist provided to confirm that I have received all the needed information from you. Please return all forms and fees to me by Friday, September 18 th. Your child s progress and feelings about school takes teamwork; parent, teacher, and child must do their part to make this year a wonderful learning experience. I am looking forward to a great year of learning and growing with your child. I hope you have a great month, and if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me. Thank you for your part in your child s learning! Sincerely, Mrs. Radzak