Hello! My name is Sierra Matthews and I am the new 1st grade teacher this year at NEMJDS. I have absolutely loved my time here so far, and I feel so welcomed by the staff, the students, and the community. We have had a busy start to the year already, and I am so excited to watch my brilliant children learn and grow this year. This is a little bit of what we have been up to:
In English, we are working on writing sentences that are grammatically appropriate, both our decoding (reading) and encoding (spelling) skills, learning long and short vowel sounds, and learning to write a story (a personal narrative).
In Math, we have completed our lessons on number sense and are now moving towards simple equations. We are also learning how to write a number sentence based on the material presented to us. We have learned place value (up to the hundreds), writing tally marks, using and manipulating tens frames, and both making and reading a graph (a bar graph and a pictograph).
In Science, we are learning about Earth’s place in space and the energy that we get from the sun. In STEM, we are working on a project to make a “beanstalk” with only index cards and tape. We also learned about the design loop of a STEM project, which we will be using for our experiments throughout the year.
In Social Studies, we are learning about being responsible citizens through determining rules and laws and discussing different social situations where these apply. We will have an emphasis on social responsibility this year in first grade, and we will be doing many projects to make our community better.
I am so thankful to teach at this wonderful school and I know that we will have an incredible year.