This Week in First Grade (11-18-13)

What did we do at school this week?
Look at all of the things we are thankful for! It looks like family and friends are pretty important in the eyes of a first grader! (Also check out our last blog post and see what first graders, family, and friends are thankful for!)

Writer's Workshop

• On Monday, we learned all about a feature of non-fiction books, labels! Sometimes pictures or photographs are labeled to help us understand what we are looking at. We brainstormed some important parts of Miss Kloczko and got to label her with sticky notes! (The picture is a little blurry... first grade photographer!)
  
  
  
  

  

  This hedgehog was independently labeled by a first grader!

  
  
• We have had opportunities to write letters a few times this year, but on Tuesday, we got to see some examples of letters in The Day the Crayons Quit, by Drew Daywalt. We learned that all letters have:
• a greeting (Dear            ,)
• a closing (Your friend, )
• a signature (our name)
  
• And we learned that most letters have the date at the top, too!
• Then we got to try out our new letter-writing skills... we wrote letters to our dads in our writer's notebooks.
• On Wednesday, we got to "publish" our letters to our dads, and write them on "fancy Thanksgiving paper."
• We wrote letters to our friends on Thursday, recommending books that we like! Miss Kloczko has a whole bunch of new books to check out, because her first graders recommended a lot of awesome books!
• On Friday, we learned that one of the best places to find "Wow words" is... books! We read a new book, Bear Says "Thanks," by Karma Wilson, and we got to stand up every time we heard a  "Wow word!" 
  

Math:

• We learned about ordinal numbers this week! Ordinal numbers are numbers such as first, second, third, and even eighty-eighth! They tell us where something comes in a series. We learned that ordinal numbers can be written in two ways. For example, when writing, we can say first or 1st.
  
  
  
• Now that we are becoming addition and subtraction masters, we added a little challenge. Instead of being given a math equation to solve, we were given an equation that was already solved, and we had to decide which operation was missing in the problem. An operation is something you do to numbers, like add or subtract.

Science/Social Studies:

• We continued to talk about hedgehogs and tawny owls, but we have started to focus more on teeth and what they do.
• Did you know that we can tell a lot about what an animal eats by looking at the shape of its teeth? Look at these animals' teeth and see if you can tell if they are herbivores, omnivores, or carnivores!

            

Fun Friday:

• Friday was full of fun this week!
• Those of us who read 250 months in the month of November got to wear our pajamas to school... so cute and cozy!
• Author Erin Dealey came to visit our school. She talked to us about how she used to be a teacher and how she never wanted to be or thought she would become an author, and now she is. She talked to us about the writing process, her new book Deck the Walls, and how we are all authors!
• We made turkey feather Thanksgiving headbands! 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

  

  My favorite photo of the day... first graders reading their new Erin Dealey books while waiting to be picked up! :)