First Grade News: We are growing like a Beanstalk

Once Upon a time, long ago 22 wee, little boys and girls came in to room 101. They had adventure and learning written all over their faces....

Have you looked at your first grader lately? They have grown so much this year. Next week we are going to measure them and compare it to their height at the beginning of the school year. My guess is that they have grown 5 inches or more--each of them.
We love our fairy tales!!! Whether it's Little Red Riding Hood, Jack and the Beanstalk, Sleeping Beauty, The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling or Alice in Wonderland we are enjoying every moment in this theme. We analyze each fairytale and pick out the element of 3, the wicked character, the setting, the problem and the solution. This week we even listened for similes in the fairy tales.
In Hands On Science we sorted, observed, compared ,weighed seeds and charted beans. We compared red beans, garbanzo beans, white beans and popcorn kernels. Our beanstalks are growing like crazy in here and will come home next week for their place in your soil.

In Reading this week you would have found our first graders reading their parts in Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood with Ms. Lorfing. They love reading assigned parts. We had puppet plays with our puppets we made last week after reading The Little Red Hen.

Reading in parts with Ms. Lorfing

Mrs. Wiedeman worked on the plurals books. The words that end in x, ss, ch, sh, and tch---- add an -es to them and others add "s" to make them plural. However, we had some fun checking the exceptions to the rule like mouse/mice; sheep/sheep. I think every child came home and tested an adult about what the plural form of Hippopotamus is....
We also learned about the end "le" and "el"-- If there is a letter with a "stick" or a "tail" before the ending it's usually "le" that is added. How about that for great rules?

Next week we will see if we remember what we learned. There are no specific rules to remembering which ending to use. There was a 70% sure way to remember though.

Making a HUMAN clock to test what some students retained about telling time was a fun activity.

Mrs. Wiedeman watched as some students strategically work their way through the easier Sudoku ---wait until next week:)

Working through story problems requires step by step reasoning. Build a pen for these three billy goats with only 7 toothpicks. We are patient....

Mr. W came several times to observe our class. He is getting his teaching degree. He read aloud the story of Sleeping Beauty and we followed along with our best "witches" fingers!!!

In Math we looked at one of our favorite author/illustrators Ed Emberly's book of fractions. We made our own fractions using shapes and coloring a fraction of it a second color.

Fractions are the name of the game! Use food to test your student on their knowledge of fractions.

Lakeside Nature Center was one of Mrs. Wiedeman's favorite field trips. Just look at Ellie below and do you see Owen and Charlie skipping. A 5 day old buny was brought in that morning that we got to look at. We love to know that there is this refuge/hospital for our animals we find that need attention. The 17 year old Barred Owl was the absolute coolest creature there. It "WHOOOO--ED" alot to let us know it was there. There was a screech owl, a barn owl and two bald eagles, just to name a few.