You're Finally Here!

First grade is finally here!

The 2016-2017 school year is off to a great start! Here's what we've been up to!

We introduced our first social skill: responsibility. Our teams have been earning lots of points every day for showing responsibility.

We introduced the world map and its seven continents and five oceans. Over the next few weeks, we'll be focusing on North America and the coniferous forest, and we'll learn about a few animals that live there.

We are getting used to our routines for math time and we have been able to review some math concepts from last year. During math this year, we will work together and independently!

This year, your first grader will hopefully start to see just how connected reading and writing are, how often we use reading and writing every day, and more importantly, how much fun they both can be!

We learned about different ways we can read a book. Ask your first grader if he or she remembers the three ways! We read a story together without looking at the words (much harder than it sounds!) and had so much fun!

Why do readers read? Gino told us, "to know how fast you can go when you're driving." Every year the kids come up with new, more creative evidence that we read ALL the time. :)

We talked about all of the different things that writers write, and the kids got to choose to write anything they wanted that day. I loved reading the grocery lists and to-do lists in particular. ;)

In first grade we will read lots of nonfiction books. The kids worked with their teams to sort their books into two piles: fiction and nonfiction.

We worked on our reading stamina! The kids were most successful when they each chose a comfy spot to read.

Our first animal—the black bear!

Almost every day this year, we'll learn a new word together. Friday's signal word was "habitat."

So many BOOKS already! The kids are very quick to remind me if we go too long without reading a book together. :)

Thanks for reading! What has your first grader shared with you about first grade? Leave us a comment below.

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American Symbols on Parade!

Well, I can't believe it has come so fast, but the end of first grade is here! The end of the school year is such a busy time... Have you been wondering what we've been up to?

We had a HUGE audience of students, teachers, and families for our performance of American Symbols on Parade. Thank you families for coming! Watch the video below from one of our many practice sessions to hear us sing a little bit of "The Statue of Liberty" and then watch a little clip from our finale! (Thank you to the Pineda and Safi families for the great photos and video!)

We reviewed all of the American symbols we learned about this year, from making our A is for America books and from singing our American Symbols on Parade songs. Then we talked about our favorites, and we each wrote an opinion piece.

After a little preparation, we did a google hangout (like FaceTime or Skype) with our third grade pen pals in Miss Mortimer's class all the way in New Jersey! Both classes were given a list of questions about local weather, the history of our schools and our cities, local restaurants, what we like to do on the weekends, fun places to travel to, and more. We each got to chat with our pen pal and share something about where we live. We learned so much about the East coast and had fun finally "meeting" our third grade friends!

We have been learning about engineering and about how light and sound waves travel. We got to do some neat experiments!

After spending the year learning about animals from habitats all over the world, we got to become experts on animals of our choice! We chose animals, did some research using the internet and books in our classroom, and then presented our research to our classmates.

And just for fun... I thought I'd draw your attention to the world map that's been up in our classroom all year. :)