We explored "Woozles" with Venn Diagrams.  The kids loved the Woozles and exploring how they were alike and different. We even created a Venn Diagram with a friend to see how we were alike and different.
The pictures that went along with our Venn Diagrams are below.
We practiced using a ruler to measure inches.  We measured things around the room to create tables and compare objects.
At first we wanted to use the rulers as goggles, but then we remembered they were just for measuring!! :)
To help celebrate Valentine's Day we used candy hearts to create graphs.  We used the words more and fewer to explain the information we gathered.
 
The 100th day of school was a big day in our classroom.  Here is our day in pictures...
We were so excited to enter the classroom in party streamers! We knew this meant it was going to be a GREAT day.
We had a ton of great ideas of what we would do with $100.
 
We shared our 100th day of school projects.  We had so many creative ideas!
We ended the day with making a portrait of what we would look like at 100, a 100 day snack, and turning the numbers 1-0-0 into a piece of art! We had such a great day. 
 
We began the week learning about the Chinese New Year.  We learned that this is the year of the dragon.  We really hope the dragon brings us good luck this year!
In order to improve our writing we are looking at real authors and trying to get inspired! This week we started reading books by Mem Fox. We read some of her books and tried to figure out what she does as a writer then we tried some of her techniques in our own work! We began adding our books into our classroom library. They are so much fun to read!!
In reading, we took all the parts of the story star and added them to a story hand.  When we are retelling a story we can think about the hand to help us remember all the parts.
We got letters from our pen pals this week.  We were so excited to read them and to write them back! Some students even made plans to meet their pen pals out on the playground. 
We began a new unit in math this week. This unit focuses on graphing and interpreting data. We learned that picture graphs are a great way to make quick comparisons. We learned that picture graphs can compare more than just two things. After studying some graphs that had multiple objects we got to make our own! First we thought of a title for our graph then we collected our data by asking our classmates to answer our survey questions. Finally, we graphed our data and wrote "more" and "fewer" sentences about what we found out.
This week we learned our 25th Hunk and Chunk!! Ask us to sing the song for you, see if we can remember all 25!
Have a great week!
Mrs. Donohue
 
This week we had our classroom spelling bee. The winner was River.  Congratulations River!!!
In reading we continued to talk about the sequence of events.  We read, "If you Take a Mouse to the Movies" to discuss the events in the order they occured. This was a story we were all familiar with.  We then read "Peanut Butter and Jelly." We used the words "First, Next, Then, and Last" to help identify the events.
We created a list of words that came to our mind when we thought of the word winter.  We used these words to create Winter Bingo.  The words were a great inspiration to our winter stories. 
We ended the week with a surprise visit from Mr. Donohue.  He even read some books for us!
 
This week was so busy I completely forgot to take any pictures!!

In reading this week we began learning about sequencing the major events of a story.  We learned that the words "Beginning, Middle, and End" will help us with this.  It was a little tricky at first because we wanted to tell EVERYTHING that happened in the story, but we had to pick the three most important events. We read The Mitten by Jan Brett to help us with this skill. We created a sequencing snowman and even got to act out the story with our very own white mitten. Our favorite part to act out was the really loud AA--AA---AACHO!!!! We will continue to work with sequencing next week.

In writing this week we began writing to pen pals.  So far this year we have been writing to Mrs. Burr's class.   We would write letters as a whole group.  This time we get to write our very own letters.  Some of us know our pen pals and some we have never met! We are really excited to have our very own friend to write to.  We spent a lot of time this week talking about greetings and closings. 

To kick off the new year we created our very own new year resolutions.  They are hanging in the hall to remind us what we would like to work on this year.  Some students want to read more, others want to help out more at home, and some want to stay up LATE!

This week in math we worked with story problems with coins.  We learned that it is silly carrying so many pennies in our pockets when we can switch the pennies out with dimes and nickels.  When we see a big group of pennies we have learned to look for groups of 10s and 5s.

For being a short week we sure did squeeze a lot in! It was a great week to start the new year.

-Mrs. Donohue
 
Happy Holidays from our family to yours!!
 
On Wednesday we had a Polar Express day filled with crafts, PJs, read alouds, a movie, and hot chocolate!! What a great way to end 2011.

We started the day with making candy trains.  We were given a plate of candy and we could assemble our train anyway we wanted.  We have some great imaginations in this classroom!
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After we made our candy trains we wrote a "how to" on how we could make a candy train at home.  This is something new that we have never learned before so it was a little tricky at first.  We will learn about "how tos" later in first grade! We completed a Polar Express graph, worked on a Polar Express word search, and even had a mystery reader that brought us candy canes! We had so much fun today.

Once our mystery reader left it was time to watch the Polar Express. We were so excited! While we watched the movie we enjoyed hot chocolate and cookies! YUM!
 
A big thank you to our wonderful room moms who put on our December learning experience.  The children had a blast! They got to decorate a cookie (AND eat it!), play winter Bingo, and create a fun magnet picture frame to take home.  Thank you to everyone who was able to help out with the donations as well. We couldn't have done it without you.
 
During Reading this week we ended our unit on Characters and Setting.  We practiced identfiying the characters, describing their action and character traits, through read alouds.  To help us understand character traits we created a poster that shows our own character traits. 
We also placed our own picture in the setting of our choice.  We had some people visit Lego Land, others went to the beach, and some even went shopping at the mall! 

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This week we listend to Olive the Other Reindeer. This is a story about a dog who thinks she is a real reindeer.  She has some good character traits that help her be the best reindeer that she can be, even though she is just a dog! We filled out a reindeer job application.  We talked about what would make us a good reindeer.  We have some fast runners, good listeners, and great leaders in our classroom!

In math, we learned about a dime.  We are experts at counting by tens so dimes came really easy for us! Ask us to sing you the new dime song we learned.  The children worked in teams to count a large number of objects.  At first they were counting their objects by ones.  They soon realized it would be much easier if they put their objects in groups.  Some groups counted by 5s and some counted by 10s.
We ended the week by taking our math pretest for Unit 5.  We also finished our social studies unit on maps.  The landform dinosaur helped us see the difference between mountains, hills, valleys, and plains!
 
This week in reading we began talking about characters.  The children worked really hard to describe the characters in their stories.  At first we wanted to describe what they looked like. (what they were wearing, what color hair they had) We learned that there are other ways to describe a character; like action and character traits.  A action is something a character does, and a character trait is how we could describe the character on the inside. 
During calendar we have been working a lot on our number sense.  We have a number every morning that we try to show in different ways.  A number can be shown with an equation, money, picture, or even just the number word.  We cut up an apple to show all the different ways of a two digit number.  This was a great way for us to see how many different ways we can show just one number! Its the same number, no matter how you slice the apple.
In math we learned a really fun game called Yahtzee.  Its not the Yahtzee you are probably thinking of, its called First Grade Yahtzee! Its a great game to practice our addition and subtraction skills.  All you need is a paper numbered 2 - 12 in a column and two die.  Have your first grader teach you how to play! We are such experts at the game that we went over to Mrs. Stewart's class to teach them how to play.  Boy, did we have fun!