September 17, 2011

Happy Weekend! The first graders in Ms. Carrasquillo's class have almost mastered, yes, mastered The Fab Five!!!! Those all-too-necessary life skills that help the school day ease into ultimate success because students are and tend to stay engaged, yes, engaged, in the learning process. We are so excited to be getting there. Research is quick to point out that without engagement, student learning falls away or is never actually attained. How depressing that would be, huh! Fortunately, we will not allow that to happen here at The Academy of Hope. It is motivating to teach when students come up to you and say, " I found myself saying I actually want to write about..." and " I said to myself, I am going to reread because I know I can understand what I'm trying to write about much better!" For first graders to be integrating this kind of vocabulary into their everyday "talk" is just awesome. Yesterday, lots, and I mean, lots, of first graders were writing 15 to 18 word sentences! Now we're focusing on "retelling" stories we've read by identifying beginning, middle, and ending details of the story and describing those sequential events. Oral and written language and reading, reading, reading are soaring, soaring, soaring! In Social Studies, we've been studying mapping skills as well as communities around the country and world and good citizenship qualities. In Mathematics, we've conquered number concepts 1-100; counting by 2's, 5's, and 10's; tallying and it's strategic importance in math, and addition and subtraction fact family concepts; with rolling dice, we're learning about probability, and with BINGO, we're learning much-needed focused listening for numbers and letters and learning to look in strategic rows and columns to locate them---later, BINGO can extend to locating multi-syllabic words and triple-digit numbers. Only on more week until Intercession. Hang in there, everyone! Have a blessed weekend!!!!