This Week

Here are a few things we've been doing this week.

We started our social studies unit, Life Long Ago, by learning about Native Americans. One classmate decided to extend the learning by building a teepee at home!

We learned about Christopher Columbus, and his three ships -- the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria. Columbus has a holiday, but some people are not Columbus fans... ask your First Grader what he or she thinks!

We searched books for verbs with -ed endings, which means the action already happened.

We played games to practice reading words with -nt, -nd, and -nk at the end.

We used dry rice to learn about capacity. We tried to get containers exactly "half full".

We learned how to double numbers, with the help of a mirror. What is double seven? Fourteen!

Thank you to First Grade photographer, Talan, for some of these pictures!

Walking in the Woods (and Math-a-Thon)

We took a walk in the woods on Friday. We are learning about Life Long Ago in social studies, so we stopped in the outdoor classroom to talk about how Native Americans might have built homes and hunted in this area long ago. We actually saw a deer while we were walking!

All students will take the Math-a-Thon test on Friday, November 18th. This is one of the fundraisers for the PTG this year. Even if you choose not to collect pledges, these are important addition facts for all First Graders to learn.

Verbs

 Our class was full of action this week, as we learned about verbs.

We worked in groups to take pictures of each other doing actions.

We used an app called Pic Collage to create a collage of pictures labeled with verbs.

Here are a few finished products!

Seesaw

The First Graders have been using Seesaw, an app on our classroom iPads,  to document their learning. Seesaw is a digital portfolio. Students can take pictures and short videos to show their learning. 

Families, just follow the directions from the beginning page in your First Grade Handbook that explains how you can view your child's work on Seesaw. The pictures below were taken by different students, and are in that student's Seesaw portfolio. There is even a quick video clip of the kids singing in music class, which I put in everyone's portfolios. They are so proud to show off what we have been doing at school!

One of our reading charts 

A page from our math journals

A page from our math journals

A word sort

Putting words in alphabetical order

A picture drawn with pattern block templates

Digging in the Dirt

We examined dirt from different areas around the school yard. We found that soil is made from rocks of different sizes and from humus -- bits of decaying plants or other things that used to be alive. We even found some tiny living creatures in the soil!