Community Around Us

First grade is literature rich in knowledge of friendships, families, patterns, and parts of speech. Ask your children about all the fabulous literature we have listened to and stories we have read during our guided reading times. The morning integrated studies time in centers, as I mentioned at Curriculum Night, is such a blessing for these students. Two hours of uninterrupted language rich activities, including spelling, parts of speech, compound words, consonant/vowel combinations and handwriting. They are really benefiting from this time.

We focused on parts of speech this week. Ask your child to name some nouns around the house, neighborhood, and classroom. We will continue the work on these throughout the year. They have a great start with parts of speech. Adjectives describe nouns. We learned that in writing and reading, adjectives make the written word more interesting. Actions are verbs. A wonderful book your student enjoyed was The War Between the Vowels and Consonants by Priscilla Turner. Check it out!

Our class experiment has been watching our "living, growing, changing" caterpillar. "Agent C" came from Mrs. Waller's garden. The caterpillar crunches and munches all day long and grows bigger and bigger! We hope it will wait to begin it's chrysalis until we are back in the classroom on Monday. Speaking of growing and changing every day. Your child brought home a card with their height on it. We have a chart that we put their names on and we will measure again at the end of the year.

This class has been working hard on peaceful resolutions on the playground, in the classroom and in the cafeteria by role playing in the classroom. The book, Enemy Pie by Derek Munson is a wonderful story we introduced to the class dealing with peaceful resolutions. We highly recommend the book.

Hands on Science today was an experiment using our senses. Each student had a paper towel with three different substances on them. Our test was to add vinegar to each substance and see what type of reaction happens. The three substances were: salt, baking soda, and powder starch. You can try it yourself at home or ask your child to tell you the results. We used all our senses except our sense of taste. With this particular experiment we didn't even have a question about whether they can taste it or not. These first graders are making observations in science and learning to make hypotheses. Today, we observed through magnifying glasses. I told them they might want to ask Santa for a magnifying glass and a medicine dropper because they are beginning their hands on science careers!

Dr. Cott, a veterinarian, and Mrs. Waller's dad, came to talk to the class about his contributions to the animals community and to the community of pet owners he has helped. Dr. Cott is the Associate Dean of the veterinary school at University of Missouri, Columbia. He impressed us with his pictures and models of teeth, ears and toe nails of animals. He presented all his pictures on power point, bigger than life! He amazed the students with facts about the largest animals he has worked on, the wildest animal and the smallest animal.

One first grader said to another first grader as they were packing up today, "didn't today go by fast?"

I think these children have settled in to their school routine. We have grown very fond of them during these first weeks of school.