Check out this beautiful fox who likes the sunshine by our classroom windows. He added a little special surprise to our Halloween celebration! Thank you Julie Wille for the gorgeous pictures. We sure hope he sticks around for a while! Before the holiday craze took over we took some time to practice our executive functioning skills. As a school we're focusing on these personal skills to help kids be more successful personally and academically. Today we started with following directions. With this simply Halloween picture we were given a set of directions only once. We had to be sure we were listening and responding quickly so we didn't miss anything! It was hard to stay on task and not miss the steps. Check out these awesome coffee filter monsters! They're super easy to make and they look great with all their monster friends up on the wall! Try it at home with other creatures! Last but not least it was party time...and it was the best (mellow) Halloween party ever. Thank you for all the help and clever crafts and activities. We had a blast! Be safe out there tonight! Since Halloween is tomorrow we decided we better start getting ready. So, today we made pumpkin bread. It was fun and delicious, just like first grade should be! Do you know how much math and how many social skills are involved in baking...let us tell you, it's a more than we thought.
Just a little bit messy. And a lot of delicious.
Wednesday's are always part learning, part fun, and part cool math challenges. Today, for fun, we learned how to draw an owl. We're working hard on a project coming your way this holiday season...so we won't give you too much information now, but you'll be seeing this owl again. If you want to do more drawing at home, check out this cool website, Art Hub for Kids. You can find so many cool animals and creatures to create at home. Check out our owls below. We love how we all followed the same directions and yet they are each unique and beautiful, just like us! Can you guess why we drew these owls on dictionary paper!?
Literacy is a big part of the first grade day! Much of that time is taken by small group reading with Miss Kylie. When she's doing that we're working independently. Everyone is doing something different; it's a little bit of organized chaos, a little bit of magic, and a whole lot of learning! Whew! We are busy!
Today we continued our How To writing...we're experts in so many things, so it's fun to get to show it off every once in while. But we didn't write about the things you might expect, like playing soccer, baking cookies, tying our shoes, or reading books. Instead we started a book to share with you at conferences. You're all experts at taking care of us, so we thought we might turn the tables and write about how to take care of you! You can expect some extra special treatment coming up!
What a fabulous success. Thank you for all the help and support. It takes a village. We are so grateful for this amazing community we live and learn in!
Today was just the best. We had a blast on the middle school playground this morning celebrating our classroom party. We love spending time outside with friends and what better way than exploring a new and different playground! Then we heard from our second scientist of the week...SLOAN! She wanted to know how many helium balloons it would take to lift up a person (specifically Sloan). Guessing that would be a lot, she settled on figuring out how many for a Barbie. We made our hypotheses and our guesses ranged from 1 to 100. Turns out about 13 balloons will make Barbie stay suspended in the air! Next week we look forward to turning this into a math problem to hypothetically make Sloan fly!
But we decided to focus on how to see the wind! Check out our awesome experiential ideas... Then we took some time to just curl up with a good book. We're getting really good at reading independently in the classroom. We made a list of what good readers do and then practiced them on our own and with our friends!
WHAT GOOD READERS DO... point to the words share books with friends ask questions persist love books make pictures/movies in their minds respect books re-read books find just right books sound out hard words use clues to figure out hard words You knew we were readers, mathematicians, artists, scientists, athletes, friends, and first graders, but did you know we are very curious researchers too!? Today we dove into a big, huge, exciting project. We will be researching and writing about Colorado animals! We've each picked our two favorite wild animals and over the next few weeks we'll be researching and creating presentations with all the cool facts we learn. Today we used the kid friendly search engine KidRex! This is an amazing site that helps sift through the craziness on the internet to find the really good, appropriate, usually educational stuff. Check it out below! We will be using Google Slides to create our final presentations, but we'll also be diving into non-fiction writing in the coming weeks so you can expect to see some fabulous research based writing coming home too! You may hear us ask you to use KidRex at home to keep researching. Now, for the cool part. When we're all done, we will create a class book with all of the information we compiled. We'll compare and contrast the different animals. AND we'll create a giant web detailing how these animals are connected and vital to our unique Colorado ecosystem.
Today we went back to our small moment stories after a brief affair with poetry. We took a look at the stories we'd written and figured we could make them even better. After all, in first grade our writing motto is: "Once you're done, you've just begun!" We used some mentor texts to make our characters move and talk in our stories and thus make our stories jump off the page!
Look at these action words. The author could have written exploded based on the picture. Instead she wrote: grew yawned stretched twirled bloomed whirled, leaked swirled spreading billowing twisting
Check out the serious toe curling, finger wiggling action...and be sure to take note of the parents voices in the background!
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May 2023
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