Scenes From Our Winter Party

We had so much fun at our party on the day before Winter Break. Thank you to all the families who sent food or party items. Also, thank you to the families who sent games for the class to use at indoor recess... Now we're actually looking forward to some bad-weather days! 

Passing out and enjoying our gifts from each other

Yummy food

Racing with "snowflakes" on our heads, and "snowballs," too

Snowman wrapping

Decorating trees...

...and ourselves!

So long 2015! See you in the New Year!

Winter Music Program

On Friday morning, we practiced at school...

 On Friday afternoon, we took buses to the high school.

Looking good and ready to perform!

 The program was a hit! The kids sang beautifully.

playing the bells

Thank you to Mrs. Dillahunt and the other music teachers for all their hard work in putting this program together. Each grade level had a chance to shine!

Shapes and Attributes

In math class, we have been working with 2-dimensional shapes and attributes.

Here, several of us are sorting buttons by attributes including shape, color, size, and number of holes.

We tried the Woozle Game, which was also sent home as homework. This was a bigger challenge than it looks! Most students could sort into two opposite categories:

straight sides and curvy sides

blue or orange

two dots or one dot

It was much more challenging to find a way to sort so that some cards would end up in the middle because they belong in both circles.

straight sides or hairy -- If they have straight sides AND hair, they go in the middle!
If they have neither, they go on the outside.

We also used real geoboards and a geoboard app to make different shapes.

Our Latest Learning

Here are a few things we have been learning over the past week.

In word study, we played a game to practice the word families -ill, -all, and -ell, as well as to review other word families we have already learned. 

In science, we have started our unit on Solids and Liquids with examining a variety of solid objects. We talked about their properties and figured out what material was used to make each one.

In reading, we are learning to read aloud like experts. Here you see a First Grader reading aloud a nonfiction book about the sun. She prepared her read-aloud like a teacher would, by marking special places in the book where she wanted to stop and discuss ideas with the class. The students had a scientific discussion about orbits, while I stepped aside to take a picture. What amazing readers and thinkers these kids are becoming!

Life Long Ago

We have been making timelines as we learned about different people in our Life Long Ago Social Studies unit. This helps us to see the order in which things happened. 

Key Word Games

We have been expanding our vocabularies as we read nonfiction books. One of the things we have been doing is looking for "key words" that are important to the topic. We might know some of the words already, and some of the words are new, so we try to figure out what they mean.

collecting "key words"

At home, you can help support this learning by making it a game. 

• Have your First Grader pick a word on the page, but not tell you the word. They have to say everything they can about that word. See if you can figure out which word it is.

For example, for the word hatch, they could say, "It means to come out of something. It is how birds get out of their eggs. The thing they are coming out of doesn't have a door so they have to break out." 

• You could also take turns saying one thing at a time about the word, until you run out of things to say.

This is a great way to build your child's language!