First Grade News: Keep A Poem in Your Pocket

NEWSWORTHY: Last week's blog showed a picture of sweet Margot Borthwick "A Day in her Life" as presented by The Children's TLC--where Margot goes to school. We accidentally wrote the wrong school name.

Keep a Poem in Your Pocket

And a picture in your head

And you'll never feel lonely

At night when you're in bed.

The little poem will sing to you

The little picture bring to you

A dozen dreams to dance to you

At night when you're in bed.

SO-

Keep a Poem in your Pocket

And a picture in your head

And you'll never feel lonely

At night when you're in bed.

by: Beatric Schenk de Rogniers

Last Week we had an opportunity to go to the newly renovated garden on the West side of the building. Mrs. Wiedeman read Elbert's Bad Word by Audrey Wood. The garden is all cleaned up. A HUGE thank you to the third grade and the toddlers who have worked on this garden. Many hands make for a light load.

We've started our unit on POETRY. The first style we have learned about is a Shape Poem. The describing words are in the shape of whatever one is writing a poem about. Some chose tulips, cupcakes, basketballs, yoda, football goals...

Mrs. L is checking reading levels so we can send them on to second grade with an accurate assessment of what level they were reading and comprehending on at the end of first grade. Mrs. W was painting Haiti banners and posters with all the kids during this morning work. When they weren't with one of the teachers, they were practicing their spelling words by writing the words in two colors--vowels were one color and consonants were another color. There was some matching of onsets and rhymes. They matched hundreds of words that we had a prefix like "scr" and an ending like "atch" or like "ump". They had to decide whether their combination was actually a word spelled correctly. Using words that end in x,ss,ch,tch we made sentences. Can you hear the difference between words with "ea" combination? Does it sound like "head" or "beach?" This week we had a Math tic tac toe board with 6 different enrichment activities. The students could make their way through Mountain Math, Math Cakes (app on ipad), Math packet of review, A Time review matching clocks with time, Word problems game and a money matching game. The students created Mother's poems, and listened to The Talking Eggs, a folktale that we just had to squeeze in. We have some poetry books written from classes in the past years here that we read also.

ea as in "head" or ea as in "beach"

Elise reading poetry books

Mountain Math

Math Cakes


Spelling review

Mrs. Z punching out holes for our sunflowers

"sw" + "ing" = swing

Haiti's Hope

In Math we began two dimensional shapes. We have shape cards and were able to put our pattern blocks of matching shapes on the pre-designed cards. We learned how many sides trapezoids have, triangles, squares, and rectangles. These students actually knew all this --so it was a review.

How about this?

Our work with shapes continued with working on our geoboards. "Show me a 6 sided figure, show me a 7 sided figure, show me an 8 sided figure...we then learned their names. We have hexagons, heptagons, and octagons!!!! We heard many kids say, "this is so fun! I love this!!!"

Heptagons

Who's big idea to let Edward's sister be Head of School for the day????? We had a Tornado Drill---HMMM!!! Thanks Anna Louise:)

Second Grade went outside on Wednesday to the garden for chapel so our first graders were chapel leaders. They did a SUPER job on such short notice. They look forward to second grade when all the students get to be chapel leaders. We also included first graders in Mrs. W's lesson. WE ARE DISCIPLES!