Hexagon, Rhombus, Triangle

We reviewed again in SWR this morning, we will have our Trimester 2 SWR asssessment tomorrow.  Ryan F. helped me during SWR to celebrate his awesome behavior! 

Please remember that there is a Valentine's Day celebration in our classroom tomorrow (Thursday) afternoon at 1:45pm.  We would love it if you could join us!  The students will be exchanging Valentine's and having a few treats.  (Many thanks to Mrs. Fetters for organizing our extravaganza!)

We explored more with shapes this morning in math.  We played the Attribute Chain game!  Ask your first grader to tell you about this fun game.  It's very tricky... we also played Design Match and built with pattern blocks.

 

We read more of our new read aloud, The Year of the Panda, we are so excited because the main character found a baby panda, or daxiong mau, and took it home with him to care for it.  We cannot wait to see what happens next! 

We also read a Chinese story about the inventions of kites and responded to this story in our China folders.  We continue to learn so much about China and everything it is famous for.

At the end of the day we worked on our realistic fiction stories and took a trip to the Giant Panda reserve in China! We watched a few short videos about pandas and their habitats.  Check out watchknowlearn.org for more amazing educational videos.

If you have not yet sent in your child's permission slip for our upcoming field trip, please do that as soon as possible.  THANKS!

Red Clover Books

Today we had our Red Clover Books celebration!

What makes a Red Clover Book?

Each year a committee of librarians, teachers, and sponsors reviews all picture books published in the prior year and chooses ten stellar picture books as the Red Clover books for the next school year. The books are considered in their entirety when chosen; both text and illustrations must be considered exemplary.

How did Red Clover Books get started?

The Red Clover book program was started in Windham County by Eileen Christelow, author of the Five Little Monkeys books, The Great Pig Escape, and many other books. Jessie Haas, another of our beloved children's book authors, best known for her horse books and her picture books of rural farm life, named the program after the state flower of Vermont, the red clover. After one year as a Windham county program, the Red Clover book program went statewide, and today children in grades Kindergarten through 4th grade throughout the state of Vermont read the Red Clover books and vote for their favorite each April.

Every student at PPS got to hear two different books and complete a project associated with the book they were read.  We really loved this activity because we got to work with students in different grades from different rooms- it was awesome! 

During math we learned a new pattern-block game: Check out these awesome first graders trying to get their partner to blindly build the same structure as them!

Gung Hay Fat Choy!

Happy Chinese New Year! This year is the year of the snake.  Today we learned about the Chinese New Year and about the zodiac signs that go with them.  Many thanks to Summer and her family for sharing so many wonderful Chinese artifacts and providing Chinese New Year books for everyone.  We had a very celebratory day today!

In SWR we reviewed for our upcoming assessment.  We are still trying to remember to end sentences with punctuation!  Our WOW word of the week is somber- gloomy or serious.  We practiced using somber in sentences today. 

During math, we rotated through stations and took our Unit 6 math test.  Look for your child's test in their math folder today.  We will start unit 7 tomorrow which is all about shapes.

We finished our classroom realistic fiction story today!  We are still deciding how to publish it, so be on the lookout for that soon.  When we were finished with that, the first graders continued to plan for their own realistic fiction stories and some of them even started drafting a first copy!  I cannot wait until they are finished and are able to share them.  

Tomorrow we are celebrating Red Clover books in the afternoon.  We are really looking forward to it! 

The Himalayas

Hannah G. led our morning meeting this morning to celebrate her awesome behavior and Gavin brought in fluffy friends to celebrate his.  We are so lucky to have so much awesome behavior in our room! 

We spent time reviewing in SWR today for our upcoming SWR test.  Words that end in "x" and plurals are still tricky for us.  The red words that we misspell the most are could, want, what, they and has.  If you could review these words with your first grader that would be awesome!  Also.... we're forgetting punctuation!  We have been working hard to re-read what we've written to make sure it's what we mean for it to be.

We reviewed in math for our Unit 6 test tomorrow.  We will be assessing: counting and distinguishing between the tens and ones places; using numbers and pictures to show equivalent numbers; knowing the value of and comparing coins using <, >, and =; and addition and subtraction facts.  The first graders worked so hard today and are excited and ready for their test.

In reading we read a Chinese legend about Mu Lan.  The students enjoyed this story because it was written in rhyming poetry form and because it had a girl as the hero and a general in the army.  We designed our favorite book covers and wrote a summary of the book on the back.  Look for your child's book in the hallway outside of our classroom the next time you're at school.  (There were a LOT of Star Wars as favorite books, naturally.) 
 
We boarded a train for the Himalayas during social studies and had an amazing time learning about them and Mount Everest.  We even watched as mountain climbers reached the peak of Mount Everest.  It was amazing!  Ask your first grader to tell you their favorite piece of information about Mount Everest. 

Tomorrow is another poetry cafe!  Feel free to join us if you're able at 2pm.  Please come with a poem to share with the class! 

100 Days

Whew!  It was a hectic one-hundredth day of school, but we really had a great time!  We started our day by exchanging all of our 10's for HUNDREDS!  What an exciting moment!

We were in the middle of our pre-test for SWR when we got a visit from ZERO THE HERO!  Do you know who that is?  He is a superhero (also known as our Superintendent) who LOVES the number zero!  He brought us doughnuts because... well... they look like zeroes!  We counted to 100 by ones, fives, and tens!  We were fabulous!

During math we had races to see who could get the highest number when setting our calculator to +1.  Joud won by pushing the +1 button 432 times in ONE MINUTE!  Can you believe it?  We graphed our results in a bar graph and analyzed the results.  We also reviwed using touchpoints to help us count coins.  If your child is struggling with counting coins ask them to tell you about the touch points.  Nickels get one, dimes get two, and quarters get 5.  Then, you count the dots by 5's and then the pennies by one.  If you would like more information about this- please let me know! 

After math, we played Race to 100 and filled out number grids to 100. Some of us were so motivated we filled out multiple hundred grids. 

At snack time, we practiced using (novice) chopsticks to eat our snacks.  We were SO good!

During literacy we wrote the letters in our names on a 100 grid and colored them in.  We noticed many patterns about our own first names.  We also wrote 100 words that we know!  Wow!

We traveled to the Great Wall of China in social studies today and had a fabulous time.  We walked around, learned more about how and why it was built and recorded our new learning in our China folders.  We are anxious to head to the panda habitat soon. 

Traveling Through China

Today in SWR we finished our very last two word families of the year!  We were so excited!  We also had a 32 point sentence that was a question and had a name.  We will have our Trimester 2 SWR test at the end of this week.  We will spend time reviewing short vowels, all of the letters of the alphabet and the sounds they make, red words, adding s to the end of words, and asking questions. 

In math we used our reference books for the very first time.  We LOVED flipping through our reference books and finding concepts we had already learned about in math and ones we are hoping to learn about soon.  We learned what a reference book was and completed a scavenger hunt to become familiar with how to find information in our books.  We already knew it was non-fiction and informational because it had a table of contents and a glossary.  When we were finished we played Fact Triangles with a partner.

We read The Paper Dragon today.  The illustrations in this book impressed us.  They were beautiful Chinese paintings.  We made predictions, asked questions and practiced retelling the events of the story in order.  We also learned three things that are very important to the Chinese. Ask your first grader what Mi Fei (the main character) realized was the strongest thing in the world and used to defeat the dragon. 

This afternoon we continued to work on our classroom realistic fiction story and chose the chacters, setting, problem and solution.  We cannot wait to finish this story! 

We traveled to Beijing today to visit the Forbidden City and Tianamen Square.  We took virtual tours of both of these places and recorded them in our China folders.  We are learning so much about the country of China. 

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!