Happy Thanksgiving - A little late

The week leading up to the Thanksgiving break was a busy one for students and teachers alike! I'm glad that I got to meet with so many of you during parent/teacher conferences. The home/school connection is truly invaluable and I enjoy the opportunity to share your child's progress with you! I hope that you find our classroom blog a helpful tool in keeping up to date with the happenings in first grade. Here are some of the things that students were doing the week before vacation. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving - how to create a free slideshow

Daily 5

I realize that it is often challenging to understand exactly what happens in our first grade classroom during the day. The following video is a short snippet of students practicing our Daily 5 routine. The Daily 5 is a structure for literacy stations. Children self-select one station to go to each day. The choices are: read to self, read with someone, work on writing, listen to reading, or art. The purpose of the Daily 5 is to allow students another opportunity to improve literacy skills while I pull small groups of students for guided reading groups. I plan to begin our reading groups the week after Thanksgiving break. Until then, everyone is practicing how this time should look, sound, and feel.

Math Stations

Domino Top-It

More fun with dominoes

Working hard in math journals (practicing using thermometers)

More work with temperature

Learning a new iPad app called Sums Stackers...problem solving and addition work in one!

We are now into our fourth unit of study in math.  It is hard to believe how much we have already studied and learned!  Here are some pictures of recent math stations.

Our iMovie! Time To...

We read the book Time To as a literacy connection to our math studies about telling time. The students then generated a schedule of what a first grader's day might look like. We took this information and used it to create the art for a class book which we turned into an iMovie before putting together. We hope you like it!

Community Helpers Mapping

On Friday students enjoyed creating a map of the important things a community might have (thank you to Miss Dube from next door for sharing the empty map) such as schools, police stations, farms, grocery stores, and many more buildings.  I was really impressed at the end when I asked students if they noticed anything was missing?  They came up with some great answers:  houses, hotels, gas stations, dentist office, etc...  We have some great thinkers in first grade!

Halloween Fun!

Halloween is always a fun and high energy day in first grade.  We had a wonderful time celebrating in school with everything from a 'giants, witches, and elf' greeting in the morning to candy corn people, a dramatic performance, and of course our fantastic Halloween party!  Thank you to everyone who contributed to our party.  It was a great success!  I'm sorry that I didn't get more pictures from the party, but my hands were quite sticky making 'gak' at one of our stations. :)

CHS students dressed and ready to read us some spooky stories!

Using incredible audience behavior while waiting

The high school drama coach getting us ready to begin

The last picture I could take at our classes party before my hands were covered in food coloring, glue, and corn starch!

Colchester Food Shelf

Beginning on Monday, November 12th and running through Friday, November 16th our class will be collecting non-perishable food items for the Colchester Food Shelf.  We will then walk next door to the food shelf to deliver our collected items on Friday afternoon!  Not only is this a wonderful way to contribute to our community during this month of thanks, but it is another great connection to our social studies unit:  Community Helpers.