Beginning of the Fourth Quarter

4/15/2012

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I can't believe we have begun our fourth quarter already.  It seems like just yesterday we were having Meet the Teacher Night.  This quarter will fly by with all the exciting things we have planned.

We began talking about nonfiction books before we left for spring break.  This week the children were introduced to a nonfiction convention notebook.  (Trust, its a mouth full to say everyday!) We have already studied the crafts of some fiction authors, so I explained to the students that now we are going to learn crafts of nonfiction books.  The children will be introduced to one a day for two weeks.  This week we learned about bold print, photographs, captions, labels, and index. 
Each day the children looked through nonfiction books to find the "craft" of the day.
The children wrote a definition and drew an example of each craft.

To go along with the nonfiction unit I introduced a wonder box to the class.  During their free time the children can ask any question they would like to the wonder box.  Throughout this month we will take time to answer some of the questions in the wonder box by researching the answer on the Internet and through books.
In writing we began writing "all about books."  The children are reading nonfiction books AND now writing nonfiction books.  The children picked a topic and wrote true facts about their topic of choice.  Some students even brought crafts into their writing by bringing real photographs from home, adding labels, including bold words, and even captions under their pictures.  I was so impressed! We learned about sea otters, rocks, time, scooters, board games, and more!
In math this week we took our Unit 7 test.  The children did great! There was so much covered in Unit 7, it is one of our biggest units of the year.  The test covered fractions, doubles, halfs, time, calendar questions, and circle graphs!

We began our Unit 8 which is all about money and double digit numbers.  We began by reviewing the coins penny, nickel, dime, and quarter.  We played a few games to help us review the different amounts. Eventually we will start adding double digit numbers!  
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March 26th

4/8/2012

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In math we learned a lot of new vocabulary. 
We practiced with words like probability, certain, likely, less likely, and impossible. We worked with a partner to write sentences for these new words.  What do you think this one would be? I better tell Mr. Donohue to get to the store as soon as he can!!

Once we knew what our new words meant we did a math experiment.  We put 8 blue cubes, 4 red cubes, and 1
yellow cube in a bag.  We pulled out a cube 20 times and recorded what we got.  We predicted we would pull blue the
most, because there are the most blue and it is more likely. 
We were right!


We also were introduced to time in math this week.  We started out with telling time to the hour.  This was really easy for us to pick up and we did great! We had a day of rotating centers where we got to complete some worksheets, play a matching game, use flash cards with our
friends, and even play a timed game on the promethean board.  
After interviewing our pen pals from Mrs. Burr's class last week, we set to work creating our buddy. Using construction paper and our own creativity we made a replica of our pen pal to hang in the hall with our biography. Each student got to type their biography in the Media center.  They did the same for us. 
Check out the display in our first grade hall!

We began a new unit in reading this week, nonfiction! We explored nonfiction books and compared them with some of our favorite fiction books.  We have learned that a lot of nonfiction books have a table of contents and include real pictures! We had a great time exploring books on volcanoes,
dolphins, horses, and even fossils. We read a book all about weather and create a windsock to share what we learned.

Happy Spring!
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March 19th

4/8/2012

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We began this week with a vistor....a LEPRECHAUN! Boy was he sneaky! We set traps to try to catch a leprechaun or gold and we were pretty certain we would come into school on Monday and have something.  All we got were hats! He turned all of our traps into tiny little Leprechaun hats.
In Social Studies this week we continued our unit on Goods and Services.  As a class we made a list of different places we have been that sell goods and/or services. We learned that some places can sell both! Using our list we created a street.  One side of the street were stores that just sold goods, and on the other side of the street were stores that just sold services.
Writing was really fun this week as we jumped into writing how-to stories.  In order to practice we wrote a how-to story together.  We all got a piece of bubble gum and tried to blow a bubble.  Then we wrote about it!  Check out our
displays in the hall and see if you can follow our directions on how to blow a bubble.
In reading this week we completed our unit on Inferring. We discussed how an author usually won’t tell you every little thing there is to know about a story, sometimes you will have to infer. To help the children understand this we inferred how the characters were feeling in the story.  We used clues from the text and our own schema to help us infer.  We spent a few days talking about the different emotions of characters…see if you can guess what emotions we are showing below. 


All year we have been writing back and forth with Mrs. Burr’s class.  This week we ended our letter writing by meeting our pen pal! We interviewed our pen pal and used our interview to write a short biography about them.  We had a ton of fun meeting our new friends!

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