Preparing your child for first grade Kinder Reading Strategies May 1 st, 2015

First Grade English Language Arts Content Objectives  Provide evidence from the text  Develop basic paragraph structure: topic sentence, evidence, and closure  Write a complete sentence with beginning capital and ending with punctuation  Reading comprehension; not just a recall, but digging deeper (theme/main idea)  Summarize the text with important details (not everything), in sequential order  More advanced word families (ight, ail, alk, etc.)

First Grade Math Content Objectives  Understand greater than, less than, lighter than, heavier than, the same as, etc.  Recognize and write numbers up to 100  Count by twos, fives, and 10s to 100  Mentally add numbers to 10  Add and subtract to 20  Add and subtract with pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters  Tell time to the hour and half hour  Recognize shapes  Identify, describe, and reproduce patterns with numbers, shapes, colors, or words  Use simple graphs to record information  Recognize simple mathematical symbols (e.g., “+”, “=”, “>”,”<”)

First Grade at Barnard  50/50 Model  In Chinese portion:  Math reinforcement  Social Studies  Chinese language and culture  In English portion:  Science  Math (Chinese reinforcement)  English Language Arts

Straight from Our First Grade Teacher….  What you can do to prepare your child for first grade:  Be at a level D guided reading level by the beginning of first grade  Have letter sound correlations down (especially vowels)  Have basic facts down for math (1-20 in addition and subtraction)  In addition to their English packet and math, students will also be receiving Chinese work packet, so be prepared for a slight increase in homework

Summer Suggestions  Keep a journal – add prompts like, “Today we went to _____”, or creative writing like: “Would you rather have the ability to fly or the ability to breathe underwater?” – Make it fun with stickers, special writing markers, special pencils, etc.  Make reading a daily, fun activity (maybe add some incentives)  Lakeshore has great workbooks for all subjects  Help your child make word or math movies where they are the teacher  Co-create books