100th Day

Our 100th day of school is Wednesday!  We can't believe we've been in school for 100 days already.  We will be participating in some special activities on Wednesday to celebrate this momentous occasion! 

In SWR today we learned about our two new word families, ___en and ___eb.  We already knew SO many words that contain ___en.  We had more trouble with the ____eb family.  Our red word of the week is what.  We are now noticing that if a sentence starts with that word, there is usually a question mark at the end.  Ryan F. helped me teach SWR today to celebrate his outstanding behavior- he was so helpful with all of the dotting!  We had a very big sentence today with a name and a question so it was worth a lot of dots. 

In math today we learned about telling time to the minute.  We also learned how counting by 5's can help us with this.  We spent time reading time in analog form, reading time in digital form matching the two forms together.  We did a fabulous job and are excited that we can begin to tell some trickier times! 

 We used traditional Chinese musical instruments to being learning about the Chinese New Year celebration!

We finished Shanghai Messenger in reading today and were a little sad when it ended.  We loved being able to understand what traveling to China may be like and hearing about all of the neat things that Xia Mei did there.  We have been working on sequencing events in stories.  When we are retelling the events of a story in order we use the words, first, next, then and last.  When you read with your first grader encourage them to retell the story in sequential order when you're through.  Remind them to pick the MOST important parts of the story when retelling because when we retell, it's supposed to be specific. 

Look at all of this amazing writing!

We departed for China this afternoon which included a plane ride and landing in Bejing!  We will be traveling around China for the next three weeks and keeping track of our travels on our maps.  We will also be learning much more about historic places there and the daily life of the people. 

We also had 2nd grade students visit our room and read us dinosaur books they had written- we were so impressed!