Hip Hip Hooray! Happy 100th Day!

We celebrated the 100th Day of First Grade on Thursday, 2/28.  We have been learning lots of interesting things and having so much fun for the past 100 days!!!

 We started the day by sharing our 100 day t-shirts, which were sooooo creative.  Here are some pictures...

100 stars in a constellation



100 bones for 100 dogs

100 stickers

100 hearts for a lovebug

100 sparkle stickers

100 smiles

100 buttons in a flower design

100 hearts

100 wiggly eyes

100 glittery circles

100 beads and sparkly hearts

100 baseball cards in groups of 10!

We did some fun 100th day of school activities, such as estimating and then counting how many jumping jacks, hops, clapping, writing our name, blinking, etc... that we could do in 100 seconds.  It was fun! 

We wrote about what we will be doing when we are 100 years old and then we made pictures of ourselves when we are 100.  Check out our writing below.

 

We read 100 Day Worries and we read a poem with exactly 100 words. We practiced building with

100 plastic cups.  Look what we created using exactly 100 cups...

 





Mrs.  Eldridge came in and did a wonderful and informative presentation for Black History Month with both First Grade classes.  The children really enjoyed it and learned a lot.

January 21, 2013

 We have been "beary" busy here in First Grade! Here's what is new...

 Reading/Language Arts We have been reading both fiction and non-fiction books and identifying the Main Idea and Details.  We also worked on distinguishing between facts and opinions.  We have been reading many different books and a few magazine articles about bears, hibernation, and migration.  We have also been learning about the elements of a non-fiction book.  The children wrote Fact and Opinion flip books about a topic of their choice, which were fantastic!  We also have been working on the long a and long i sounds.  We learned about "magic e" and the rule that when two vowels are together, the first one does the talking and the second one does the walking.  We wrapped up our unit on nouns, verbs, and adjectives.  The children worked in their Literacy Centers to reinforce these concepts.  Some of our Literacy Centers were Listening to a story and identifying the MI and Details, Long A and I card game and Make a Word, Finding the Main Idea and Details, Fact and Opinion Flip Books and Fact and Opinion Sort, Read It, Draw It, Use It in a Sentence, and a Noun Collage activity.

We started taking Spelling Tests this month! The children are doing a great job and love doing different Spelling activities.  One of our favorites is using our letter vests to make the words!

Science and Technology:  We have been learning about Animals in Winter this month.  We learned about the different ways that animals get ready for the winter.  This theme has been taught in Science and then also incorporated  into Reading, Writing, Math, Social Studies, and Technology.  After learning all about hibernation, migration, and hiding, we focused on bears.  We have learned all about the different kinds of bears.  The children are working on creating a short slideshow about bears using the App Explain Everything on the iPad. They will present their slideshows during class.  Stay tuned... a copy will be emailed soon!  We are also writing Bear Books, which are chapter books.  The children came up topics for each chapter and then had to research using books in the class and magazines to find their information for their book.  They are doing a great job!

The First Grade has been working closely with Mrs.  Drake on our Banana Experiment.  Earlier in the year the children planted banana peels and plastic bags outside in the playground area.  We were not able to dig up the banana peels and bags until after Superstorm Sandy.  When we dug up the peels and bags we discovered the bags were still there but absolutely no trace of the banana peels.  We assumed that they either decomposed or an animal ate them but good scientists need evidence so Mrs.  Drake had us put more banana peels in large cans with soil.  Every week we are digging up the peels from one can to see how the banana peels decompose over 5 weeks.  The children absolutely loved this!  Here are some pictures...

Look! We found sprouts!

 

Observing what we found in the soil.

 

 

Writing:  We have been busy publishing our fantastic books! Our Publishing Party is coming up!
I hope you will be able to join us on Wednesday, 2/6 ! The children did a spectacular job and are very proud of their work!

Class 1M authors/illustrators working on their books

Social Studies:  We are so excited to participate in a great Teddy Bear project through Iearn.  Mrs.  Burg and both First Grades have been paired up with a 3rd grade class in Pakistan.  We have a bear and the children named her Liberty.  We packed a few travel essentials for her and a journal and then we mailed her to a school in Pakistan.  They will mail us their teddy bear too.  Our bear will go to Pakistan and see what life is like for the children in that school.  We will see what he does in school, on the weekends, etc.. and the bear that will be visiting with us will do the same. The classes will keep journals of what the bears do, email each other, and Skype.  This should be a really fun and meaningful experience.  Stay tuned...

First Grade packing up Liberty for her trip to Pakistan!

Math:  We just finished working on estimation.  We learned how to estimate and how to use groups of ten to make a more accurate estimate.  We just started Place Value.  Click on the link to hear a cute song that we learned...
Cute Place Value Song
We have been learning how to use base ten blocks to show different numbers and we have been learning how to trade ones and tens and tens and hundreds.  We played a really fun game called Race to 100 to reinforce these concepts.

Teddy Bear Sleepover:  We had so much fun at our Teddy Bear Sleepover.  Our bears spent the day at school with us and then we tucked them in and went home but those silly bears were not ready to hibernate.  Click on the Smilebox to see what happened!

teddy bear sleepover

Have a great weekend!

1M News December 6, 2012

Thanksgiving Fun!
I hope that everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! I am so thankful to have such a wonderful class and wonderful parents to work with! We had a great time at our Thanksgiving Feast! Thanks so much to our fantastic class mothers, Mrs.  Dalal and Ms. Balcu, for organizing and helping to make sure the feast was a success.  Thanks so much to all of the parents who sent in the delicious food and who volunteered their time to help.  Here are some pictures of the feast below...

 

 Community
The children loved learning about their communities and community workers.  We learned about the three types of communities, needs and wants, goods and services, community workers, and places in our communities.  We created community scrapbooks and will be creating a 3-D map of our community.  We also chose community workers that work in our very own school and we interviewed them.  Mrs.  Burg helped us video them and we are creating a wonderful slideshow. Stay tuned...  We also had a fantastic time on our trip to the Edison Municipal Building.  We got to meet the mayor of Edison, She talked to us about what her job is and how one becomes the mayor.  She also let us see her office.  Then she took us to the Edison News room and we made a short commercial for Edison T.V.  It was adorable!  Then we went on to the police station, courtroom, animal shelter, and then the firehouse.  The children learned a lot and had fun doing it! Click on the link below to view a slideshow of our trip.
http://smilebox.com/playBlog/4d7a51794d6a55344f546b3d0d0a&blogview=true

Reading/Language Arts
We have been very busy reading books that have strong main characters.  We have been working on identifying character traits, making inferences about characters, comparing and contrasting characters, and seeing how a character's feelings can change throughout the course of a story. Some great books with strong characters that we read in class are Amazing Grace,  The Art Lesson, Koala Lou, Little Nino's Pizzeria, and Junie B.  Jingle Bells.   We created character suitcases for our favorite characters. We learned about adjectives, which we call sparkle words, and we started to learn about nouns.  We just wrapped up learning the short e sound and beginning blends and will begin long vowels next. 

Math
We have been working on Even and Odd numbers, Greater Than and Less Than, adding and subtracting doubles, facts to 18, and reading and writing word problems.  We used some great apps to practice these skills, which are Banana Math, Rocket Math, and Math Bingo.

Science
We have been learning all about temperature and have been graphing the weather and the temperature every day.  We also started our Animals in Winter/Bears Unit.  We started to talk about how people and animals get ready for winter.  Today we learned about migration.  

October 15, 2012

We have been so bust in First Grade!  We had the Senior Buddy assembly and we got to meet our senior buddies Ashani, Jonathan, and Daniel.  They even stopped by during D.E.A.R. time to read with us.

Fall Fun!
We finished up our Apples unit.  We had fun learning all about apples and Johnny Appleseed.  We did a fun experiment to see if all apples have the same amount of seeds. What do you think the answer is?





We got together with class 1J and did an experiment to see which would sink... an apple or a potato or a pumpkin!  The apple and the pumpkin floated because it they are denser and have more air inside. Next week we will take it a step further and do an experiment based on a question that a few children had today which was, Do all fruits float?We had so much fun making applesauce as our final apple activity.  The children read directions, measured, mixed, and mashed all of the ingredients.  Then they got to eat the applesauce.  We had mixed reviews!  Then we read How to Make an Apple Pie and See the World. After reading this book we decided to research where all the ingredients from our applesauce came from and also found the countries on our map.  Click on the Smilebox below to see the children making applesauce. Enjoy!

http://smilebox.com/playBlog/4d7a4d314d4459324e44413d0d0a&blogview=true
Fall is such a fun time of the year!  We have been discussing the changes that take place during the fall and we wrote about what we like to do in the fall and created fall trees.  They are hanging on the bulletin board outside our room.  Please stop by and see them.

Graphs, Graphs, and more Graphs
In Math we have been working on graphing.  We learned how to read, write, and create tally charts, bar graphs, pictographs, and pie graphs.  The children worked in pairs and came up with a title for their graph and then they surveyed the 4th graders and tallied up their responses. They wore little moustache disguises and said, "I moustache you a question..." They took the information they gathered and they created a bar graph.  They really seemed to enjoy this activity! Here are some pics...

I "moustache" you a question!

 

 

We also did a fun activity with Mrs. Burg using the laptops.  We created M&M candy pictographs.  We each got a small packet of M&Ms and we sorted the candy by color.  Then we created a pictograph using the laptops.  We learned how to copy and paste the different colored M&Ms to make our graphs.

 
We also worked on using graphs to answer questions and we used pictures to create different kinds of graphs, which are hanging in the hall. We also just finished up working with patterns.  We used a fun app on the iPad called Farm Fun, which was a great app to reinforce patterns.

  Reading 
We have been working on the short a and i and o sounds, beginning blends, sight words, and word families in Phonics.  We have also been focusing on the strategies that good readers use.  We have learned that good readers point with their finger(track), use pictures(eagle eye), cross check the pictures and the text, stretch out the words(stretchy snake), chunk up the words(chunky monkey), look for patterns, look for words in words, and make predictions.  The children have been practicing these important strategies during Independent reading and have a special reading tool kit to help them.  The Reading Fairy stopped by to drop off some magic reading wands!  We have started to work in our Guided Reading groups.  The children are doing a great job and are very enthusiastic about reading and literacy centers.We also have been busy working on reading with expression.  We have learned to use punctuation cues to help us read with expression.

Writing
In Writing, we have just finished our Adventures of Super Me books! They came out ADORABLE! We have been busy working on using proper spacing, punctuation, capitalization, and penmanship.  We have also been reading many different versions of the story I Know an Old Lady that Swallowed a Fly .  We are in the process of writing our own versions.

We learned that all stories have three parts, which are the beginning, middle, and end. The middle is the longest part of the story.  We read Where the Wild Things are and then retold the story using pictures and writing.  We put everything on a large storyboard and then identified the beginning, middle, and end of the story and created a large storyboard.

 Social Studies and Technology
We began our communities unit. We learned what a community is and what a neighborhood is.  We talked about our school community and made a list of school community workers and came up with three questions that we would like to ask them during an interview that will take place this week.  We also learned about the three types of communities, which are rural, urban, and suburban.  We used the iPad to locate a farm, suburb, and city using the Google Earth app.  They had a blast doing this! We read some great books calledCity Kid, Country Kid and Country Mouse and City Mouse and used a double bubble to compare and contrast them.

OCTOBER REMINDERS
1.  Library day is Tuesday.
2.  Wednesday, October 31 is Halloween.  The children will change into their costumes after the class Halloween party.  We will have the party, change into costumes, and then go to the Halloween parade in Laidlaw at 2:00.  All parents are welcome to attend.


Have a wonderful weekend!

Jennifer Molloy