A good Friday always begins with these lovely faces. Thanks for the lollipops 5th grade. Next a visit from the dentist. We learned about brushing, flossing, drinking water at night, and gross things like plaque and cavities. Yuck! Oh, and we each got our mouths checked out. Turns out we're good brushers. Keep it up! Steve Marolt talked about his recent trip to Nepal. He and his climbing partners (including his twin brother and Aspen buddy) just spent four weeks in Nepal climbing and skiing a 23,000 foot peak. We figured out that's 11,000 feet higher than the top of the Highlands Bowl. The air must be thin up there. We also learned that the temperature up there was regularly -40. Send us some of that chilly air and snow! Steve inspired us to follow our dreams. He was just a regular first grader in Aspen once dreaming of higher peaks. After working his way across the Colorado 14ers, Alaskan mountains, and South American peaks he made his way to the Himalaya. Thanks for teaching us about another amazing mountain range! After a whirlwind pencil hunt we found 26 pencils hiding. That's only two more than last week. We ended on a sugary note with a Valentine's exchange and sweet treat party!
We started our classroom kindness quilt today! We are all filling out quilt squares each time a classmate gives us an act of kindness. Turns out it's pretty easy to be kind. We're challenging ourselves to reach 100 squares by the end of March. We certainly started off strong today! Then we kept the heart theme going with conversation hearts. We sorted them, graphed them, added and subtracted them, and wrote word problems with them.
Today we put our own surveys out there and tomorrow we will graph the data. Here are some of the things we investigated:
1. Do you like chocolate or vanilla better? 2. Do you like owls or dolphins more? 3. Would you rather figure skate or play hockey? 4. Do you like playing with Legos or playing Minecraft better? 5. Do you like Christmas or St. Patrick's Day better? We had a chance to write about our collections today. Turns out we have strong feelings about our favorites and we have the evidence to back it up. It was so fun to see all the different collections and hear all of the strong opinion words come out in our writing.
In preparation for Valentine's day we are working on kind hearts. Today we focused on the words that come out of our mouths. This morning we categorized words (like we've been categorizing in math). We looked at words that help our hearts and words that hurt our hearts. Turns out it's pretty easy to tell what a word is. The tricky part is stopping the hurtful words before they bubble out. Tomorrow we'll be working on filling our friends buckets with these two wonderful books...
A good Friday always begins with a visit from our reading buddies. We worked so hard during reading time today. Many of us even CHOSE to finish our work instead of going on the computers! Wow! We figured out that we are over half way through first grade. Seemed like I had almost second graders in the classroom today. It was marble behavior. We worked hard to wrap up the snowmen that go with our snowmen at night writing. We also created the covers for our owl chapter books. The books are filled with facts and information, so we figured our owls could get a little crazy! Can you guess why they are drawn on dictionary paper? Check out our hard work! Very colorful owls! Snowmen from above!
Have you ever wondered what snowmen do at night? Does your snowman ever look a little different in the morning? Maybe he's been out all night with his snowmen buddies. Today we came up with our own ideas of what snowmen do at night and where they go. Then we took a different perspective on the snowman and started to create "snowmen from above."
Thank you for a fantastic Owling Night. The kids did an amazing job reading Owl Moon. Ike made a fabulous Great Horned Owl. The ACES owl was definitely a hit. I know we heard some owls, but there were rumors flying around of a wild owl spotted last night too! Today, Charlie defied the rules of science as we knew them. He made a paper clip float! Yep. You read that right. But I thought that paper clips were made of metal and had big giant holes that let water through and pushed the paper clip right down to the bottom? Turns out that if you very gently put a tissue in the water and then very gently put the paper clip on top...the paper clip floats--suspended on top of the tissue. It was floating at 11:20 this morning, it was floating when we left school at 1:55, we'll see what's going on tomorrow morning. Obviously, we've had science on the brain because Maddy brought in an experiment from home too. She filled a glass jar with water. We then watched what happened when she dropped red food coloring into the water and then yellow afterwards. The red floated it's way around the water, almost looking like dancing smoke. When the yellow was added it mixed with the water immediately, but the red was still suspended all over the place. Eventually, they both mixed together. We wonder if yellow and red food coloring have different properties. This experiment was made twice as cool with the lights off and a flashlight shining into the water! Thanks Charlie and Maddy. Both excellent experiments to check out at home!
Are you ready for tomorrow night? We proved we are with an awesome reading of Owl Moon. BRAIN BREAK. Which moves go with the following words: sphere, texture, productive, respectful, grief In this math unit we're collecting data. We're graphing it, organizing it, and analyzing it. Today we tried to figure out all the possible characteristics of shapes and how we could use this data to group them. Here's what we came up with for characteristics: shape, size, color, number of vertices, number of sides, number of bases, shape and size. Then we did the same thing with buttons. We put our data on a class chart. Here's what we came up with for characteristics: shape, size, color, number of holes, texture, and material.
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May 2023
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