During the Thanksgiving season, we spent some time learning about Squanto. We found out that Squanto was a Native American who could speak English. He taught the Pilgrims many things that helped them survive the harsh conditions they found themselves in. As a finale to learning about Squanto we made a yummy snack that reminded us of what Squanto taught the Pilgrims.
A big thank you to our parents for the awesome Halloween party. We had such fun making the crafts and enjoying the treats. We appreciate you!
The past few weeks we have been working so hard to find the key details in our reading selections. The students have quite on quite well to this important comprehension skill. They are now calling them our to me as I am reading aloud to them after lunch! It's amazing! they are just like little sponges!
On Tuesday, May 26, we learned about 3D shapes. Students had a good handle on naming the shapes and remembered quite a bit from kindergarten. We talked about the faces, vertices and edges of the shapes and then sorted many everyday objects according 3D shapes. Next, They were given two building materials and two rules. Do not eat your building materials and do not touch your neighbor with your materials. They were asked to build a cube, a pyramid, a triangular prism and a rectangular prism. They did so with relative ease! Afterward, we discussed the marshmallow vertices and the toothpick edges. Then the students ate their math!
When the date of our field trip was changed due to a rainy forecast, we decided to create our own fun kind of learning. The story in our reading book was called Meet Rosina and was about a deaf girl and the way she went through her day. We compared her school day to our school day and decided that we have many similarities. One thing that was different about Rosina's school is that they use sign language to communicate and Braille to read. We invited Mrs. Strode's third graders to our room to teach us a few things about sign language. The students learned to sign their own name along with the names of some family members and pets. It was a good time and we thank the third graders for sharing their good knowledge with us. We spent the rest of the day conducting Science experiments and focusing on the Prediction portion of the scientific process. Students made thoughful and smart predictions about what might happen in several different experiments. May students called on things learned earlier in the year to make their predictions. That made their teacher very happy! They are using what they already know to help them learn something new. It was a happy day in first grade even though we did not get to go on our field trip. In this experiment, the scientists were really thinking about what was in the milk that made it "try to get away from" the dishsoap that we dropped in to it. We cameup withthe theory that there must be some kind of grease or fat in the milk because thatis what Dawn soap fights! There was good discussion about how that is what is used in oil spills and how maybe the o il is similar to something in the milk. Those little brains were smoking with that discussion. They pulled in so much knowledge from their backgrounds. I was very impressed! We have worked hard this year reading non fiction text. One of the important skills first graders need to know is how to find the main idea of the text they are reading. When reading biographies of their choice online, these first graders identified what made that person noteworthy enough to have a biography written about him or her. In this way, students are finding the main idea of the biography. Here they have written the main idea on their white boards. In March we celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday by reading many of his books, sorting red fish and blue fish (and green fish and gold fish) into groups and graphing our data. We also enjoyed eating green eggs and ham in our pajamas. What a fun way to celebrate on of our favorite authors!
We spent a good deal of time third quarter working on research writing. First we learned about the life cycle of a frog. We took notes about our learning through words and pictures. Next, we used the internet to research some of our favorite animals. Then we wrote good paragraphs about them. Students loved having the responsibility of choosing the animal they wanted to learn more about. They discovered many interesting facts and learned how good writers organize their information along the way.
The second half of the year began quickly with our new student teacher Mr. Sarver and we never looked back! Here are some of the fun things we did throughout the second semester.
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December 2015
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