As with any skill that we want to become more proficient at, practice is the best way to achieve that goal.  With this in mind, below are some at-home activities that you can use to help your child reach his/her full potential while in first grade:

1)  Technology   I have made available a great website (https://www.kidsa-z.com/main/Login?_ga=2.239730755.1369539451.1663031602-1196384586.1663031602) to provide your child with fun reading activities to reinforce our first grade curriculum.  Your child will be given a password so that he/she can access this website at home.  (Username pmason13)

2)  Read!  Read!  Read!   Help your child develop a desire to read by making it a part of your daily routine.  This can be achieved by you reading to your child, listening to your child read to you, or sharing the reading of a book.  By providing daily reading practice, you will be helping your child to strengthen his/her decoding skills, recognition of high frequency sight words, oral reading fluency, and proper intonation while reading.  The more you read, the smarter you'll be!!!!

3)  Write!  Write!  Write!   Look for opportunities for your child to sound out words as well as write simple sentences.  Refrigerator letter magnets and personal journals are just two examples to help your child develop his/her written communication skills.  Your child should be able to write a "readable" sentence that begins with a capital letter and ends with a punctuation mark.  Spelling does not need to be totally correct, but you should be able to "read" the words via phonetic spelling.

4)  Addition and Subtraction Facts  While it is not necessary for your child to memorize all of the basic addition and subtraction facts, it is helpful if they commit many of these facts to memory.  Most importantly, your child should have mathematical strategies to quickly solve these facts.

5)  Money!  Money!  Money!  Your child should be able to recognize the name and value for a penny, nickel, dime, and quarter.  Equally important, your child should be exposed to frequent opportunities to count coins, especially  dimes, nickels, and pennies.