First Grade News: Moving into November

Another FUN-FILLED week in 1st grade!

We are sad to say good-bye to bears but new and exciting activities are on the horizon!!

In small groups Mrs. Waller guided the children as they worked in their theme notebooks. The pages from this notebook will be coming home this week...please look through them with your child. They worked so hard learning about bears of the world!

Ms. Lorfing did guided reading in small groups this week. Our focus was to get everyone used to our new books in the bag program. Everyone has learned how to pick a "just right" book. They've learned not to judge a book by it's cover and to do a quick book walk before choosing what they will take home for the night. Thanks again to you all for helping them get used to their new homework. We are off to a great start!

Lila is reviewing short e words in her phonics book.

Jake and Griffin wrote adjectives on this face frame to describe themselves. Such true descriptions of both boys!

Page is practicing her spelling words with the magnetic letters.

Alex is working on word building with short e words on starfall.com

Campbell used these bear related words to write a word from A-Z in every box on her page.

Joshua sorted nouns into categories according to person, place or thing.

Abby practiced writing her spelling words on the spelling graffiti table.

David is building numbers 1-100 using the hundred board.

Jack is reviewing odd and even numbers 1-100.

Abby is listening to a non-fiction book on bears in winter.

Our focus in math week continues to be greater than, less than. We've moved up to 2 digit numbers to determine greater or less than. We also began working on subtraction. Even though we've done subtraction in number corner since the beginning of the year, our focus is now on the process of subtracting numbers.

We practiced greater than/less than using dominoes.

We practiced our subtracting skills using white boards and Linus the Minus.

Raquel made subtraction equations using playing cards.

We used the human number line and our frog leap number line to practice subtraction.

In math, we also reviewed ordinal numbers. We learned that ordinal means putting numbers in order. We learned when you write each number it has 2 letters behind it like, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc.

The entire class had to line up the numbers 1-10, 1st-10th and first through tenth using cooperation and no talking. They did an excellent job with this task. We were very impressed.

We took some time out of our busy week to get together with our buddies for some good quality reading time. Many shared their spooky Halloween stories. Others shared our great class books and our bear fact books. The 7th graders were all quite impressed!

In TNT we used flashlights and cuddled up with our bears to have a read-in.

In social studies we finished our bear unit by learning where the teddy bear came from and how it got it's name. It was fun to learn that a president could be a strong and powerful leader but also be sweet and gentle towards an innocent bear in the wild. It was also fun to hear about all President Roosevelt's many different pets he had while living in the white house! We also finished our bear flip book of facts on the panda, sloth, spectacled and sun bears.

In science we did a fun activity on polar bears called "Polar Bear Pie". We integrated math into the lesson after we learned more facts about the polar bear by predicting how many bites it would take to eat a polar bear pie (Klondike Bar)!

YUMMY!!

Finley enjoyed his pie tremendously!!

In computer lab we reviewed subtraction with a game on abcya.com.

Last but certainly not least, we enjoyed our last day with our bears with the teddy bear picnic! Thank you parents for supporting us all during this theme and sending fun lunches and funny jokes and riddles for us to enjoy!