A Peek Inside 1st Grade - a letter to parents from Ms. Bradley

Excerpt from a recent note our first-grade teacher sent to the parents of her class:

Dear Parents,

What a delightful week! The first graders continue to enjoy their math block. This week, we continued to learn about the qualities of numbers, concentrating on 7, 8, 9, and 10. Our images for the numbers come from multicultural stories from around the world. Two of our favorites this week were the Native American legend of the rainbow for the number seven and an African tale about Anansi the Spider for our study of number eight.

The students have also been working with the four processes by using manipulatives and taking mental-math journeys. On one such journey, we pretended to go trick-or-treating. As we collected imaginary candy, we worked with addition, and we subtracted when we "ate" candy. When we went from house to house for an entire block at a time, we practiced multiplication. Division came into play as we fairly shared our treats with friends. These mental math games are a wonderful way to plant seeds for the more formal work we will do with the four processes later in the year.

Highlights for this week were building bench forts, sharing first grade with our loved ones on Grandparents' Day, and silly jokes. Why was 6 afraid of 7? Because 7 ate 9!

8 is for Spider