Class 1

I am Pamela Penrod and I'm beginning my third year as the teacher for class 1. I am really excited about this year and the things that are planned and am eager to share some of my curriculum with you.

We follow the Utah State Core Curriculum. You can find a copy of this on the Utah Education Network website, or I have a copy you are welcome to look at. In going through the curriculum carefully, I have found that we end up ahead of our grade level requirements in many different areas. For example, by the end of the year students will be able to tell time to 5-minute intervals. In the state curriculum, "Read, tell, and write time to the hour and half-hour" is listed under 2nd grade. We study cups, pints, quarts, and gallons, which is listed under 4th grade.

I am passionate about reading and its importance in the lives of children. Your child will be required to spend a minimum of 20 minutes reading each night. Reading not only helps your child improve their reading ability, but it helps improve their writing, as they see ways that others express themselves in text. It is important that students have the chance to read books at their reading level, as well as hear a variety of books that interest them. Hearing books read aloud also helps them learn to read with expression. Discussion of stories read helps to develop comprehension, sequence and attention to details. These are all important elements of reading that we work on in first grade.

We will be studying 240 of the most commonly-used words in our language. It is my goal that by the end of the school year, students will be able to read all of them and spell most of them. Studies have shown that the 100 most frequent words account for about 50% of all words found in printed material. We will also be studying about 60 word families. This means that some weeks we will be studying two different word families. I am trying to incorporate other subjects in with these word families. For example, we will be studying the -at and -ump families in October when we can also study bats and cats as well as pumpkins.

In social studies, we study change over time. Students will study how a pumpkin seed changes into a pumpkin. When we study the -og family, we will learn about dogs and frogs, and how tadpoles change into frogs. Halfway through the year, students will also have a dictation sentence to practice along with their spelling words that will contain some of the spelling words in it. This is to practice writing proper sentences, especially beginning with capital letters and ending with correct punctuation.

In addition to our classroom activities, we will enjoy some great specialists this year. They include: art, foreign language, physical education, creative dance, yoga, music, and science.

I believe in finding out exactly where each child's abilities lie and building upon them, challenging each child at their level. I am able to acomplish this because of the small class sizes at Meridian, and have seen exciting growth with past students. I use our time during centers to target different areas with different students according to their needs. In math, when students finish their daily classwork, they will be able to extend learning with math centers, games, or other activities. I also sometimes tailor homework according to different things students need work on and according to different learning styles.

I hope you'll take the time to visit our class and see what we're doing!