St. Brigid: Parish

1st Grade - Mrs. Keating

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Mrs. Carol Keating is the First Grade Teacher.  She has been a teacher at St. Brigid School for more than twenty years.  Mrs. Keating received her Bachelor of Science in Education degree from Miami University.  She attended the Ohio Writers' Project at Miami University and received training in classroom management at Boys Town in Omaha, Nebraska. 

First Grade is an exciting and challenging grade to teach!  We are always busy whether we are reading, writing, singing, exploring, or praying.  Our classroom is a bright, comfortable space with computers, desks, lockers, and a large rug for gathering and reading.  Students move throughout the classroom as they work in centers, at their desks, and on the carpet.  To foster self-discipline in my classroom, I follow the Boys Town approach called “The Well-Managed Classroom for Catholic Schools.”  The emphasis is on teaching classroom and social skills to students in a systematic way.  Students are effectively praised for desirable, on-task behavior.  Students in my classroom earn pennies for good behavior and are rewarded with a trip to the First Grade Store on Fridays. 

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Here are some of our favorite things to do in First Grade:
        
Religion: Faith First, our religion text book series, does a wonderful job of presenting the students with lessons rooted in Catholic doctrine, scripture, and liturgical seasons.  We attend weekly Mass with the whole school and participate in special seasonal liturgies. 
        
Reading and Writing: What we say, we can write, and what we write, we can read.  In my classroom it is often hard to tell if it is reading class or writing class since we write in order to read and read in order to write.  With this in mind we write our First Grade News daily and use it as a spring-board to journaling and story-writing.  We also use this News to practice our phonics and reading lessons.  We learn phonics with the Letter People, and we read big books as well as songs and poems.  Students take home a bag of books every day to read (DEAR books—Drop Everything and Read!) because a child that is surrounded by good literature will become a successful reader and develop a lifelong love of reading!

Math: We use a variety of manipulatives, hands-on activities, games, computers, workbooks, songs, and pictures to help us learn math.  Using Grandma’s Magical Math, we draw pictures to help us memorize addition and subtraction facts.  We play card games and partner games to reinforce the concepts we learn. 

Field trips:  We take a field trip to a local nursing home to sing and show off our Halloween costumes in October.  We attend the Victoria Theater each year to see a production.  In May at the conclusion of our animal study we spend the day at the Cincinnati Zoo.     

Here are some of my favorite web sites that you may want to visit:

Current News

 

 

Everyday Words

 

St. Brigid School
312 Fairground Road
Xenia, Ohio 45385
937-372-3222 / phone
937-374-3622 / fax
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