First Grade News: Once upon a time...

FAIRY TALES AND FOLKTALES!!

We have eagerly jumped into our new theme with lots of excitement! This week we focused on what the difference is between a fairy tale and a folktale as well as the elements that make up each tale. It has been fun to see all the prior knowledge everyone has on these tales. We can tell these stories have been shared at home which makes our job at school even more fun! We're reading different versions of the classics and comparing and contrasting them.

Eli is unscrambling fairy tale sentences. He had to know the events of 5 different stories before he could do this skill!

Naomi illustrated one of her unscrambled sentences.

One of the folktales we read this week.

Sophia knows the difference between a fiction and a non-fiction book.

We used old Scholastic New orders to locate fiction and non-fiction books. These 2 are great at finding the different kinds of books.

Knowing Easter is right around the corner, we used a fun activity to reinforce place value skills and reading skills. Clue cards gave the information as to where to place each number. Once the number was formed it was recorded on a sheet. Another Easter activity helped us review adjectives, nouns and verbs. We had to put each labeled egg in the correct category.

Great job categorizing nouns, verbs and adjectives Oscar!

Emma used her white board to write down words she finds and can read around the room.

We used our Smartboard and whiteboards to practice our spelling words. We learned some words that end in -le have a double consonant before the ending. We also learned that many of our spelling words had a root word before the -le ending.

We practiced our money skills with the Smartboard. We had to identify who had more or less coins and then record the amount by writing it's value as well as using a stamp with the coin amount. Everyone is getting great at maneuvering on our new board!

We practiced our alphabetizing skills by putting fairy tale/folktale words in order.

In small groups we learned the appropriate way to write a friendly letter. We will soon be writing letters as fairy tale characters and will be making mailboxes to deliver them to other characters (fellow classmates).

We have been hard at work finishing up our Australian animal stories. We have gone through the entire writing process and are now publishing our books. We can't wait to share them with you!

Elizabeth is working on her book cover.

We used a powerpoint to illustrate the important features of fairy tales and folktales. Then, we had clues to read to try to identify the hidden tale.

Jackson is identifying -el words he found while reading and listening to the story "Tate is Able" on the computer.

In math we've working on standard and non-standard measurement. We used many different items in the room to measure objects. We learned how to estimate the size before getting the actual measurement.

Lily is using pennies to measure a name tag.

Jackson and Lamar are using unifix cubes to measure the height of the table.

APRIL FOOLS DAY!!!!

Mrs. Waller brought in a pan of "brown-e"s to the class as an April Fool's joke.

Here's another joke played on these clever first graders...the never ending maze! Of course, it didn't take them long to figure out we were joking with them again!

Naomi thinks she's got it figured out!

Jackson says, "Are you kidding?"

In social studies we've been learning map skills in preparation for our folktale story maps we'll be making next week. We've learned that good maps include a title, a map key and a compass rose.