As our school year comes to an end first grade has been filled with F-U-N! We have had three days of excitement.
Monday began with week with Game Day. Students brought in board games from home and taught each other how to play! We had the classics: Twister, Chess, Monopoly, and Shoots and Ladders. We had some newbies: Cake making, Heximoes, and many others I had never heard of. The students taught each other the games and had a morning filled with fun. They worked cooperatively, moving from game to game, and picking up as they went along. There weren't even any disagreements! It was Wonderful! Tuesday was Arts & Crafts Day. Boy did we have fun! There were craft stations all across the room. We had birdhouse painting, watercolors, chalk with black paper, giant chart paper for story making, and a table FILLED with craft materials such as beads , cotton balls, glitter, jewels, buttons, yarn, string, tissue paper, paper bags, popsicle sticks, and googly eyes! Students made amazing and creative creations all morning! We had paper fidget spinners, bracelets, necklaces, crowns, paper bag puppets, doll beds, pompom creatures, and creative water color portraits. We ended our craft day with creating little shell people for beach day and coloring ferocious fish! Wednesday brought us Beach Day! This was a BUSY, BUSY day! It started with practicing our class play because we had a performance around the corner. Kindergarten arrived at 10 to watch the show. The first graders hit it out of the park! (But would you expect any less?) After the show ended beach day began! Students brought their beach towels, books, beach balls, hats, and coloring supplies outside for a morning of exercise and excitement! There were ocean activities like ocean animal riddles, crossword puzzles, word searches, and Animal Sudoku! It was a blast! The afternoon brought us shaving cream desk art! The photos of our fun are below! Enjoy!
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My students amaze me! On Friday we were supposed to have a field trip. As you all know, the weather forecast was less than perfect. Unfortunately, our trip had to be cancelled. The student's (and teachers) were pretty disappointed. So, on a whim, after talking with Mrs. K and Principal Buchinski, we decided to invite parents/families in for an impromptu play performance of our reader's theater "Flowers in January." So a late Friday afternoon e-mail was sent to all families inviting them to the show. The turn out was AMAZING! So many family members were able to attend...with less than 24 hour notice! Not only did we have a full classroom of parents, grandparents, and siblings...the students were ROCKSTARS! They performed the play flawlessly! It was filled with emotion, laughs, dancing, and smiles. It turned a disappointing day into quite a special occasion! Thank you to all the family members who took time out of their busy schedules to attend and to Mrs. K for suggesting we put on the performance! The students did an fantastic job and they certainly couldn't have done it without her! What a wonderful way to close out the first grade school year!
What a week it has been! First grade has been hard at work researching ocean animals. The students each have their own animal to discover. They began by reading a nonfiction text about their creature. Next they recorded information that they found including habitat, diet, predators, behavior, life cycle, and appearance. The students drew a diagram of their animal and labeled it with all the important features of their creature. Next week students will create their poster to be able to present their findings to the class! Below are photos of some of the amazing ocean creations we have done since our unit began last week.
Our week ended with field day today. WOW! Did we have fun! The class rotated through 12 stations in the morning, ate lunch together outside, and did many additional activities outside in the afternoon such as face painting, chalk, bubbles, hula hoops. The afternoon ended with a friendly game of tug of war, the sliming of Principal Buchinski, and popsicles. Below are photos from the day! This week was filled with artistic creations. During our literacy time we learned about adjectives. We used adjectives to describe all sorts of nouns. Each first grader created a self-portrait of themselves surrounded by adjectives that they felt described them as a person. Students were paired up to help each other come up with unique adjectives for their project. It was wonderful to see students complimenting each other. Their self portraits came out wonderful! (I love their eyelashes!) In math, we began discussing plane shapes and their attributes. Students reviewed the names of shapes and learned about square corners, angles, and sides. Finally, each student was given two sheets of colored shapes to cut out and be creative with! The directions were: you must use all the shapes provided and you must come up with an original idea. The first graders were quite creative! We had pictures of penguins, people eating ice cream cones, elves with presents, houses with dogs and cats, apple trees, and so much more. Check out the photos below to see all the hard work the first graders did this week!
We are back from April break and learning is swirling around the classroom! This week we really dove right into organizing, representing, and interpreting data. The students are loving gathering their own data, deciding what symbols to use to represent the data, and making their own charts. They are even brainstorming and writing their own questions comparing the data they collect. We will continue gathering, organizing, representing, and interpreting data through next week. I know the students don't want this math unit to end and neither do I! It's been so fun! Check out the photos below of their hard work.
What a wonderful turn out we had for family math night on Tuesday! It was great to see students from our class, as well as Mrs. Wright's and Mrs. Barnes' classes. I loved seeing the students interacting with their families and having so much fun! There were some friendly competitions forming at each game table! I also saw many students teaching their moms, dads, brothers, sisters, and grandparents how to play each game. Seeing them explain the games really lets me know they understand how to play and what the purpose of each game is. Each game that you were able to play with your child relates directly back to what he/she is learning every day in the classroom! For those of you that couldn't make game night, don't worry! I did send home a few copies of some of the games this week with your child in their folder. I'm sure they would love to teach you how to play! Photos from our math night are below!
Enjoy April break! What a busy week of learning about and writing poetry! For the next 4 weeks we will have Mrs. Kosiorek as a guest teacher coming in to teach poetry to the first graders. We are honored that she has volunteered her time to help us all learn. The students absolutely adore her and loved every second of her lessons this week. This week she came in on Monday and taught all about poems with repetition. The students listened to poems with repetition read by yours truly and Mrs. K. The students read poems with buddies and began writing their very own autobiographical "I am" poems with repetition. Throughout the week I worked with students to add voice and details into their poems. We wrote and conferenced daily, published on Thursday, and shared our poems today with all three first grades! It was a fantastic week and next week Mrs. K will be back to teach us how to write poems about feelings! Check our the photos of our poetry week below and don't forget to come back next week to see what the students feelings poems turn out like!
Hi everyone! I'm happy to announce I finally have a website for you all to view! A big THANK YOU to Mrs. Kosiorek for introducing me to weebly.com and helping me start my website! There certainly was a learning curve, but I think I may finally have the hang of it!
On the website you can find information about me, the first grade curriculum, our monthly newsletters, homework information including the weekly trick word / HFW for the assessments on Thursdays, and some great link to education websites your child might enjoy. I hope you explore the website and fin everything you need! But as always, if you con' find information you are looking for- head over to the CONTACT page to get in touch with me! I will try to post to the Blog page once a week! So remember to keep coming back for updates! A quick update: On Friday, I introduced a new math game called Numbers Undercover to the class that will be at our Math night coming up on Tuesday, April 11th. They LOVED it! Click the gallery below to see how much fun they had! |
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