First Grade News: First Grade is Filled with FUN!

Wow! What a week! Your children continue to impress us, and we are so grateful to all of you for entrusting them to us everyday. Here are a few things we have been working on this week:

Gage won our drawing last week and chose to sit in the teacher's chair for a day :)

INTEGRATED LANGUAGE ARTS BLOCK- Take a look at the pictures below. The pictures are from our integrated language arts block in the mornings. We focused on the –ill and –it word families, compound words, and vowels vs. consonants.

Matching smaller words together to make compound words

Writing and illustrating our compound words book

iPad flow app

Writing in our journals about Family Fun Fest and the Pet Blessing

Playing a vowel vs. consonant game

Screen writing the -ill word family

Reading Officer Buckle and Gloria in our listening center

Making a month chart

Practicing using uppercase vs. lowercase letters

Reading our BIG books with pointer sticks

Making Words!

Mrs. Sansale continued working with small groups on guided reading this week. Miss O’Connor worked on rhyming with the students. They read The Rhyming Dust Bunnies, and then were able to make their own rhyming dust bunnies using pom poms, glue, and markers. Take a look!

Guided Reading with Mrs. Sansale

A page from the cute book, Rhyming Dust Bunnies

Our Rhyming Dust Bunnies!

MATH- This week, we have been working on Friends of Ten and Skip Counting numbers. We now can skip count to 100 by 2s, 5s, and 10s. We skip counted while bouncing balls and jumping up and down. We also used our skip counting to help us navigate through a maze as well as other activities. We are continuing our number corner everyday as well. The equations your children come up with are becoming more and more impressive!

Friends of Ten Chart

Skip Counting by 2s Maze

Skip Counting by 5s Maze

Skip Counting Game

Number Corner

Look at those equations!!

SOCIAL STUDIES--In Social Studies the students have been presenting their FAMILY COLLAGES and their HOW I GOT MY NAME homework projects. This is a great way for the students to learn to be a good listener and to practice their public speaking skills in front of their classmates. The students love learning information and new things about one another. We continue to work in our theme notebooks as we learn about ourselves, others and our caring community. This theme is such a great way to start the year as we build our own amazing classroom community. Below are some of the family collages!

TNT- We have some art lovers in this class! The students made their names by gluing colorful scraps of paper onto a large piece of construction paper. Take a look!

HANDS-ON-SCIENCE/ COMPUTER LAB- In computer lab, we used what we had learned about skip counting to use the Interactive Hundreds Chart on ABCya.com. And in Hands-on-Science, we did a Sink or Float experiment. The students predicted whether each object would sink or float in a bucket of water. At the end, we challenged the students to change a ball of clay into a shape that would float. They did great!