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

September 21, 2012

First Grade is SUPER fun! It was a pleasure meeting everyone at Parent Partnerships and at Back to School Night. I look forward to a super year in First Grade.

We have had such a fantastic first few weeks of First Grade! Here are our 1st day of 1st grade pictures...

Reading The children have been busy learning the routines in First Grade. This week we started Reader's Workshop and we learned the routines that go along with it. We reviewed the consonant sounds and worked on the short a sound. We worked on syllables, rhyming words, sight words,and alliteration. We talked about what good readers do and we focused on tracking, using picture clues, and looking for patterns in a story. We began working in our Literacy Centers. We worked in the listening center, used magnetic letters to make short a words, we used playdough to make different sight words,and wrote alliterative sentences. We also read the room with superhero masks and worked in the stamp a word center. Here are a few pictures of the children working in their centers...

Fantastic Books We Have Read Some wonderful books that we read are A... My Name is Alice by Jane E.Bayer, Eating the Alphabet by Lois Ehlert, Superhero ABC by Bob Mcleod, First Grade Here I Come by Nancy Carlson, ABC I Like Me by Nancy Carlson, Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes, 1st Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg, My Friends by Taro Gomo, and First Grade Stinks by Mary Ann Rodman. One of our favorite books was Scaredy Squirrel by Melanie Watts. It is all about a squirrel that is looking for the "perfect" friend. After reading the story we discussed what makes a good friend. Then each child picked a classmate's name from a jar and they had to draw a portrait of them and then write waht makes them a perfect friend. They did such an awesome job and they LOVED hearing all of the reasons why they would make a great friend. Stop by and check out their portraits.

Math The children have been very busy in Math. We reviewed counting by 1's and 5's and we worked on number formation and counting. We also played Number Line Squeeze to practice number sequencing. We also played Top It and was definitely a favorite in our room.Then we moved on to Tally Marks. The children learned how to write and count tallies, played Tally Top It, and then created tally charts by surveying their classmates. We also used our Smartboard during calendar time to reinforce these skills.

Writing We have been working on penmanship and writing mechanics. The children began writing in their journals. They did a great job writing their Guess Who's for Back to School Night. We just started writing our own super hero themed All About Me books. Stay tuned...  

Science and Technology We have just started working on an apple theme in Science. We learned about different kinds of apples, how an apple grows, and the parts of an apple. We did a really fun activity using the Smartboard with Mrs. Burg. We talked about how apples were a favorite fruit here in the U.S. but we did a little research to find out what the favorite fruits are in other countries and then we each got a map and we found the countries and put the fruits on each country. It was a lot of fun. We also did a few activites on the Smartboard about how an apple tree grows. The children began using the iPads and LOVED it! We used the app Doodlebuddy to practice tally marks and we also used Word Bingo, Teach Me 1st Grade, and Moofy Patterns. This week we will do a few inquiry based science experiments involving apples. Stay tuned...

Scroll all the way down for some fun links and reminders. Have a great week! Jennifer Molloy