This week we learned about adjectives. We learned that an adjective is a word that describes a noun. We highlighted adjectives, went on an adjective hunt, and used our 5 senses to help us describe nouns. The children's favorite noun to describe was the S'mores we created.
Before we made S'mores we tested out our 5 senses on marshmallows.
In math this week we began our unit on measurement. We were introduced to Mr. Measurement. He doesn't always like to follow the rules and he measures things the "nonstandard" way. He will use cubes, shells, and even his feet to measure things. We started the week measuring the nonstandard way, and ended the week measuring in inches.
In writing, we began our unit on poetry. We learned about Acrostic Poems. We had so much fun making these. At first they were a little tricky, because we all wanted to write sentences. We have learned the whole year to use capital letters and ending marks and then this week we were told we didn't have to! You may have seen an Acrostic Poem come home in our bookbags on Friday. We created a special one just for our moms!
This week was especially busy because we had our Animal Museum followed by Student Led Conferences. We have been working really hard getting ready for the conferences we were all very excited for them! Our favorite part was showing off our first day of first grade writing AND giving our parents HOMEWORK!!!
Before the animal museum started we went on a scavenger hunt.
Take a look at our animal museum...
After the animal museum it was time for Student Led Conferences. We did such a great job and enjoyed sharing reading, writing, and math with our parents. The next day we reviewed our parents homework and gave everyone an A+!!
We ended this busy busy week with our 150 paw celebration. We decided to celebrate with popcorn, stuffed animals, and a movie.
Wow! What a fun busy week!!
Of course we couldn't let spring go by without a learning experience! Our awesome room parents put together a wonderful hour of fun and learning. As usual, we are so thankful to them!
We ended our nonfiction unit by researching an animal of our choice. We wrote a book full of facts and information that we learned. I can’t wait for you to see all the things we learned at our animal museum this Tuesday!
To go along with our nonfiction unit we had a box called the
wonder box. Children could ask any questions they were curious about to the wonder box. As a class we researched questions on www.ask.com. After we had a lot of practice the children were able to explore their own questions on www.ask.com. The children created posters to show
others what they learned. During this busy time we managed to squeeze in a few lessons on Earth Day. The children learned about the 3 Rs – Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. We were surprised to find out we did a lot of these things already at home and school. We listened to “It’s a Wonderful World” and created mental images with water colors. We combined our paintings with Mrs. Stewart’s class to create a quilt on Earth Day. You can see this displayed in the first grade hall.
Olivia created this Earth Day poster during her free time!
We have been busy learning about nouns and verbs. Meet our new students Nick Noun and Vicky Verb.
To help us learn about verbs and nouns we listened to some songs. The kids LOVED these!
Noun SongTo help us learn about nouns we went on a noun scavenger hunt, picked nouns out of sentences, and went on a noun hunt in books searching for a person, place, and/or thing.
To help us learn about verbs we had a verb relay race. We learned that a verb is an action. What better way to learn this than a verb race with Mrs. Stewart’s class! We had so much fun!
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!
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!
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!
We started out the week with our field trip to see Charlotte's Web play. We had such a great time!
Last week was our last week learning about different authors in writing. Some of us were so disappointed because we really enjoyed this unit. The good news was that we were going to study authors in room 1417: US!!!! We spent the week working with our friends to write and illustrate books. We were so excited! The children were actually begging to work on their books! It was so neat to see.
In math we spent the whole week learning about fractions! We know that cutting something in half means we have two equal groups and cutting something into fourths means we make four equal groups. We found out we could use this when talking about quarters too and are excited to add it to our schema about money. We created a fractionpillar and made a pizza with our choice of toppings.
In reading we added a new word to our vocabulary: inferring! We learned that when you infer you use your schema and texts from the clues. To help us with this concept we looked at riddles and tried to guess what the riddle was talking about. We learned that one riddle was talking about squirrels because we knew that squirrels liked nuts and had fur and paws! We tried this skill our our own with a poem, which we brought home this week.
You may have heard that we had a vistor in our classroom this week: A LEPRECHAUN! Boy, was he messy! He visited us on Thursday and Friday so we decided to set some traps. We set them out on Friday so we will see what we catch on Monday. We are hoping to catch some leprechauns or may even some gold! We will keep you posted!! To help celebrate St. Patrick's Day we wrote a review on our favorite book.
Once again, we had a great week in our "Buggy for Books" adventure! Our bug jar is getting so full from all the reading we are doing. The homemade bugs looked great. The kids enjoyed visiting the "bug museum" throughout the week.
This week we began our Buggy for Books reading month. The children had such a great time participating in different activities throughout the week.
We enjoyed reading books by Dr. Seuss.
We brought our favorite stuffed animal from home and included them in our daily reading!
Many students wore a t-shirt you can read. We also enjoyed showing off all the items from our scavenger hunt. Wow..did we find a lot! On Friday we added our bugs to the classroom bug jar. Keep your calendar handy and get ready for next weeks activities!
We started March out by celebrating a wonderful author, Dr. Seuss.
We had 21 "things" in our classroom.
We completed some Dr. Seuss inspired crafts and even included him in our math lesson about estimation. We estimated how many Swedish Fish we could fit in our hands. We are becoming great estimators!
After reading The Foot Book we talked about antonyms.
We created wacky Dr. Seuss characters that are almost as tall as we are! The kids came up with some wacky names to match their characters. You can read about them next week. We wrote stories about them for next week's writing homework.
As you may know, Dr. Seuss loves to rhyme in his books. He sometimes has to create new words so that his stories will rhyme. We had to pick out the real words from the nonsense words in this fun game!
We ended this fun week with a game of Green Eggs and Ham inspired Tic Tac Toe. We also created Thing characters with our face and name on them. You can check these out in the first grade hall.
Check out more pictures from Dr. Seuss week here:
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