Thank you to everyone who created a family feather for our first grade thanksgiving display. It was wonderful for us to see how much we have to be thankful for!

We have started collecting poetry for our poetry folder, which we keep in our book boxes to read at any time. These poems are a great way to build fluency...and they are fun to read! Usually we add one poem a week, but this week we added two! We used poems this week to create mental images.  It was so fun to see how different our mental images were from our friends.  We learned that our mental images are different because our schemas are different.

Our hunk and chunk song is up to 10! Make sure to ask us about our song, and what each chunk sounds like. These chunks not only help us on our spelling test, but also when reading and writing words.

These past two weeks in writing we have been having a ton of fun with sparkle words and synonyms.  These words help our stories sound fun and exciting! A person using sparkle words might start their story like this, "One bright sunny morning..."  A person using a synonym could maybe try using the word grumpy for mad.  We had so much fun creating synonyms every day this past week.  We now have a synonym wall in our classroom that we can use during our writing time.

In math we started a very important unit on place value. Our focus this week was discovering the importance of the number ten, and that two digit numbers are actually a secret code for ten sticks and leftovers. Using the teen numbers we  practiced drawing and writing equations using tens and ones. Understanding how to use ten sticks and leftovers is going to be very important in the weeks to
come!

Last week our class was visited by a scientist from High-Touch, High-Tech. We learned a lot about gravity, balance, and motion. We got to experiment with magnets, balance objects, shoot a water launcher, and bring home pocket rockets.  Science was definitely made fun!