Friday, March 11, 2016

Old Sac, Chatterpix, and More!


This week I had your first graders email me their contributions to the blog! Here's what they had to say:

We did chatterpix. We painted ostriches. We did smart cards on our ostrich chart. We learned about the ostrich. Ms. Dolly gave us stickers. We learned about the pangolin. 😁 -Alex and Jared



Today we did a spelling test. Yesterday we learned about ostriches. -Ryan and Aaqil

We went on a field trip. Our class did a test. Here are some words we did: sneaking. -Indigo and Carol

We had a field trip. It was fun. For Fun Friday we watched The Lion Guard. -Cooper and Juan Carlos

We learned about ostriches. It was pretty cool. -Jaykob  

We watched the second Lion King, The Lion Guard. I bet the third is going to be The Lion Dad. Liam and Nya are partners again! -Liam and Nya

We learned that a single stride of an ostrich can cover 10-16 feet. And we also learned that ostriches can't fly. On Tuesday we had a field trip. We had to mind our manners every time we answered a question. -Jade and Lea

For Social Studies our class went to a field trip. -Fabiana and Kendall
(Thank you parent chaperones for all of your help and for the fun photos!)


We want to learn about the cobra and the cheetah. -Jules and Lorenzo

A few things the kids didn't mention...

We read a funny book, "Stand Back," Said the Elephant, "I'm Going to Sneeze!"

Mrs. Duley was our mystery reader!

What's happening in Math? The kids are becoming place value experts! This week we learned about hundreds and we continued to work on comparing numbers. Understanding place value makes comparing numbers easier! (We even got to practice comparing numbers during science, when we watched a video of an ostrich racing a football player! 43 miles per hour is greater than 20 miles per hour, so the ostrich is faster!) 

The kids wrote some great poetry! The best part? They went through the entire writing process DIGITALLY! We got some inspiration from Giraffes Here, Giraffes There, used our sentence patterning chart to do some prewriting, and then typed our rough drafts! The kids were doing some pretty advanced stuff... copying and pasting, changing font colors, sharing google docs, clicking between tabs in google chrome... So impressed with their teamwork while learning these digital skills and reviewing all of the parts of a sentence.

Here's something new we've started doing during our Africa unit... picture prompts! Today the kids were shown the photo below and given the task to simply write! So amazed at what they came up with!

Every day, I do my best to encourage my first graders to be good citizens. In the classroom, on the playground, and at home, they seem to have a pretty good idea of what that looks like. But what about being good digital citizens? Because so much of what kids do inside (and outside) of school is digital, and because technology is likely to become even more prevalent in their lives as technology continues to advance, I thought it would be a good idea to talk about digital citizenship. We started with a lesson on internet safety. Ask your first graders if they remember the three rules from the video we watched on Monday! 

Last but not least... Chatterpix. :)