This Week in First Grade (12-9-13)

Here are some highlights from this week!

A special visitor...

• First graders have been learning about the different types of teeth and what they do, so our visitor this week came at the perfect time. Students at Star Academy got to learn about how to take care of their own teeth!

Reading:

• On Friday, we learned to Read for Meaning at an assembly with Phil Tulga. Through music, we learned about three reading strategies: sequence, inference, and prediction. We were grooving and dancing and learning all about reading! So fun! See the blog post about the assembly with pictures, video, and more on the Star Academy blog! 
• We heard a story called The Snow Deer, and there are 10 pictures to help us remember the sequence of the story. After hearing the story a few times throughout the week, we talked about some important elements of the story(author, title, setting, characters, problem, solution). You can talk about these same story elements in the books you read at home with your child!
   
  

Science/Social Studies:

• This week we learned about a new animal  in the woodland habitat in Europe... the fallow deer! The fallow deer is an example of an ungulate and it also a quadriped! Ask your child to tell you what that means. :)
  

Team Tasks:

• This week, we focused a lot on cooperation. At the beginning of the week, we brainstormed what cooperation looks and sounds like, and we continued to add to the list throughout the week. Teams earned bonus points during team tasks for doing the things we put on the chart.

One team working on the Immigrants from Europe World Map Team Task

Writing:

• We read the book Written Anything Good Lately? by Susan Allen and Jane Lindaman and talked about all of the things that writers write. Writers write more than just books! Writing is so important and useful, and best of all, FUN! We made lists of what writers write in our notebooks and here are some things that we came up with...
• books
• emails
• text messages
• shopping lists
• stories
• thank you notes
• Christmas cards
• letters
• songs
• poems
• chants
• non fiction books
• comics
• reminders on sticky notes
• We wrote letters to Miss Kloczko... (I LOVED reading these!)
  
• We listened to the story Owl Moon, by Jane Yolen and made lists in our writers notebooks of all of the words that we liked in the story as we listened. Then, in the computer lab, we typed the words from our notebooks into a google form. See the word cloud below with all of the words that we wrote. The bigger a word is, the more first graders there are that wrote it!
   
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

This Week in First Grade (12-2-13)

What happened at school this week?
Miss Kloczko was out of the classroom in GLAD training Tuesday-Thursday, with 25 other teachers (yes, 25!) watching two experts teach Mrs. Luhrsen's first grade class, and she learned a ton! Due to the fact that Miss Kloczko didn't get to teach this week, this post will be a short one...

Math:
Here are a few things we learned this week:

• Telling time to the half hour
• Making tens to make counting big groups of objects easier.
• For example, if you have ALL of these hedgehogs, you can make groups of 10 to help you count them. Because there are so many, it's easy to make a mistake if you simply count, even if you use one of the strategies we learned earlier in the year (such as crossing out each hedgehog as you go).

Writing:

Some things we wrote about this week:

• Thanksgiving Break
• hedgehogs
• google accounts
• the woodland habitat in Europe and what we have learned so far
• our favorite Disney characters

A is for America

We added two new pages to our A is for America books about important American symbols: G is for Gold, and I is for Immigrant.

Science/Social Studies

• We learned about what an immigrant is and that over the years, many people have immigrated to America from many different places. Many of our ancestors came from Europe long ago, and many of our ancestors came from other places more recently. Maybe you can talk with your child about how your family ended up in America!
• We also learned a new chant about the Statue of Liberty!
• JUST FOR FUN... Ask your child to give you the definitions of a few of our signal words!
• woodland
• carnivore
• operation (a math signal word!)
• immigrant

What are you reading?

In first grade, we LOVE books! Leave a comment and tell us:

• the title and author of a book that you recently read
• the title and author of a book that you are reading now
• the title and author of a book you plan to read next

You can also reply to someone's comment by clicking the "reply" button below their comment! If you have read or plan to read the same book as someone else, reply to their comment and tell them!

What is Miss Kloczko reading?

I just started a book this weekend that my mom recommended to me, called Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail by Cheryl Strayed. It's about a girl, not much older than me, who impulsively decides to hike over 1,000 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail... alone! The best part of this story? It's a TRUE story! So far, it is very interesting! I have been on parts of the Pacific Crest Trail, but I can't imagine hiking for months and months in a row on it. Did you know that the Pacific Crest Trail stretches all the way from Mexico to Canada?