First grade is action packed, filled to the brim, monkey bar swinging, nonstop awesomeness.  Today, so much so that Miss Kylie couldn't remember to take pictures until recess!  So check us out in our element, playing with friends on this sweet playground, in this amazing place we call home!

In our MindUP curriculum we learn a lot about our brain.  One thing we spend a lot of time on in first grade is the art of calming down.  This can mean taking a deep breath, re-evaluating a situation that makes you mad, or how to work through personal frustrations.  Today we learned another strategy that's a whole lot of fun.  ZENTANGLES!  Zentangles are drawings with repeating patterns.  They are intricate, careful, and beautiful!

We're working on a big, huge, amazing project coming for you around the holidays :) 
We can't tell you too much about it right now, but here's a little sneak peek of what we got started today...including some detailed zentangle work.  Zentangles are a great project to work on at home if you need a little quiet time or some space to calm the brain down.

Library with Miss Lisa May is THE BEST!  Today you'll see our very first library book coming home.  Library books are due back every Day 5.  In first grade we're working on responsibility.  For library that means returning our books on time and treating them with extra care. 
​Take a look at this quick video from Miss Lisa May.

Yesterday we took poetry and turned it into pictures.  Today we did the opposite.  We took a picture and turned it into the most beautiful words.  Check out our collective autumn poem!

It is autumn.  The leaves are red. -Baylie
My shoes are tumbling the dry sunburned leaves. -Silas
Autumn is here, leaves fall in the breeze. -Norah
I think it will be crunchy. -Max
Leaves all around and yellow leaves too. -Beck
Oak leaves are falling. Red, bright, and yellow. -Edy
I was walking through the shadows and the tunnels of leaves, crunching, beautiful. -Kai
I see a tunnel.  I see leaves. -Boti
The tunnel through the trees and red leaves. -Yari
Red foxes are in the trees and leaves crunch. -Ella
I was walking in a tunnel in fall made out of leaves. -Coco
I see some leaves.  The trees make a tunnel. -Dayanara
The beautiful leaves and the tunnel. -Ana
I see pretty red leaves as if it were a rainbow. -Mary Catherine
I see a tunnel of leaves.  Leaves on the ground.  I see a tunnel of trees. -Andrew
A tunnel of red, orange, yellow leaves wave. -Sloan
Red over me.  I go through the autumn. -Carter

In first grade we do A LOT of writing.  You may have heard about our small moment stories.  We're really good at writing stories about our own lives, because after all we're experts on us!  Our focus right now is zooming in and adding as much detail as possible.  We've been reading and writing some poetry to help us get ideas.  Some poetry is so vivid we can make pictures or movies in our minds of what we hear. Our goal is to put the same juicy words and feeling in our everyday writing!  Check out our pictures from these two vivid poems.

This week we learned four more vocabulary words.  We are extra excited to share them with you in conversation at home.  Ask us what they mean and ask us to give you a synonym!

Friday is the first day of fall...so today we got ready.  We observed, tested, tasted, wrote about, and embraced fall's fruit...the apple!

First we did some science!  Have you ever noticed that apples turn brown once their flesh hits the air?  We were wondering if there was a way to preserve the quality of the apple, similar to the way a refrigerator or a freezer preserves food.  So, we tested milk, soda, water, and lemon juice against our control apple slice with just air. 

Here we are using our pipettes to put on just the right amount of liquid!  It was fun to get to work with our table mates, take turns, and problem solve together.

After lots of careful observation and time, here's what we discovered:
Lemon juice preserves the apple best...for now.  We can't wait to see what they look like tomorrow. We're hoping kinda gross :)

Then we did a taste test and some writing.  We see the world with our eyes.  It's easy to write about what we see all day long.  The apple is red.  The apple is big.  The apple has a bruise.  So today we switched it up and wrote with our sense of taste...no peeking!  We tasted six different kinds of apples.

We picked an adjective to describe each taste.

And finally, we learned their secret identity and wrote a poem about either our favorite or least favorite variety.  

First graders are great spellers.  But sometimes it's easy to get caught up in doing everything right and we're afraid to make mistakes.  So...today during writing we focused on spelling our best without worrying about right or wrong, just worrying about if you can go back and read it a second time.  If you say a word, slide your way through it, and put a letter for each sound you hear, it's going to be A-OK.  After all, that's what editing is for!

We love Eureka math.  We're learning our math facts lickety split and we're onto more challenging things.  Today we reviewed how to make combinations of six and moved right along to seven.  

We even threw in a little probability.  We learned that the most common combinations of six are 3+3 and 2+4.  We'll learn why tomorrow when we play the game with combinations of seven.