Happy Holidays to All!! We are keeping occupied in first grade during an exciting time of year.  The students are excited to share many of the holiday projects that we have been doing in class.  Check their back packs to see all of their beautiful work!

Here are some pictures of an art project we did today....It was a directed drawing of the Grinch! They had to follow basic step-by-step directions to create their masterpieces of this Christmas character.  After we had the basic lines, they added color with crayons, and some finishing touches of a snowflake filled sky.  They are all so unique and absolutely fabulous! I hope you enjoy them as much as we did while creating them.

Science Unit: The Sun, Earth and Moon
Students have started to build deeper understanding of the Earth's position in space relative to the sun.  We built models to show how it rotates and revolves around the sun, which causes day light and night time, and the changing seasons.  We also have started to examine the moon relative to the sun and Earth and how we can only see the moon when it is reflecting the sun's light.  When we return from vacation, we will be collecting information about where we see the sun relative to school during different times of the day. 

Math

Here are some photos of our number corner and the work that the students have been doing with fact families. During number corner we have been focusing on fractions, telling time, and place value.  There are also some photos of the fact families that we have been working on this past week.  Students created these equations to match pictures that had two parts and a total.  We use the term fact families to learn about the relationship between numbers.  The term is not as important as the overall concept, which is the relationship between addition and subtraction.  Building this concept provides more understanding of how to use addition to solve subtraction and how to solve for unknown numbers.  

Readers Workshop

During readers workshop, we have continued to build our good reading habits that help us to decode challenging words and read with stronger fluency and comprehension of the text. As students practice these habits, they build a repertoire of strategies to choose from that strengthen reading skills. Here are some photos of our readers enjoying their stories and practicing their good habits. There are also pictures of our class charts with the language we use to name these habits. Celebrate your reader! This group has been working hard! Happy Reading!!! 😃

FUN-O-Ween!

Here are some photos of our class enjoying some Halloween fun! We played musical chairs, eye-ball toss, witches hat ring toss, ghostly bingo, and heard a spooky story. The kids had a lot of fun and came to school the next day with lots of stories of their Halloween tricks and treats! 🎃

Today our class helped parent volunteers prepare for the harvest dinner, which will be on November 2nd.  We scooped out squash, shredded carrots, and helped clean up a GIANT mess.  Please be on the look out for more details about this event.