The students have been having a lot of fun learning new ways to help us remember how to identify place value in math. We have been doing a little role playing. I have been the drill sargent and they have been my soldiers. We have a catchy chant that we repeat while practicing. The students have been comparing tens and ones to talls and smalls. Tens stand tall and ones are small. The students have been participating and modeling tens and ones. If they are tall, they stay standing. If they are small, then get down low to the ground. As a class, we then count up all of the tens and ones. The students really enjoy interacting while practicing this concept.

We also had fun this week while learning about contractions. The students become surgical doctors for the day. They had a name tag with their medical name, gloves, and a mask to wear while completing this activity. Each student was given two words. They had to perform an operation and cut apart the words and create a contraction by using a bandaid to stick the letters back together. They will make great surgeons some day!

Who knew learning could be so much fun?!?!

Our 100th day of school is fast approaching! What has been your favorite part of the school year?

Happy Holidays! I hope you are all enjoying your break. I know I am. What has the best part of your break been so far? I have really enjoyed being around my family. We went to see the movie Chipwrecked today!

We have been having a lot of fun with our Gingerbread Man unit this past week. Some of the things we did with this unit were comparing two different versions of the Gingerbread stories, making a class book, syllable sorts into gingerbread cookie jars, decorating gingerbread boys/girls, and a really cool science experiment to see if the Gingerbread Boy could have survived the swim in the river if the fox would not have eaten him. Check out our class snapshots! Next week, we will continue to have some fun with other Christmas stories. We are having a lot of fun in first grade this holiday season!

The students learned how to use a program called Audacity in the classroom this week. This program allows us to record our voices on the computer. In first grade, we have been  learning different strategies to help us with our fluency. This week, we recorded our reading story. Each student had the opportunity to read a sentence or page from the story Land of Ice. We recorded ourselves reading and then listened to the whole recording when we were all through! Using Audacity enables the students to hear themselves read. I plan on having students read more books using the Audacity program and saving them on our class Mp3 players. This was a fun way for us to practice our fluency!

The students worked very hard on the Thanksgiving program. I would love to hear your feedback about it. What was your favorite part?

The students graphed who likes to eat turkey. They colored a yes label if they like to eat it and a no label if they do not like to eat turkey. Their label was then placed on a circle pattern. This circle became our pie graph. After placing all of the labels on the circle, a pie graph was constructed. The students analyzed the data that was on the graph. We have done a variety of graphs this year. This was a fun graph to complete! Check out our cute turkey that we made!

Today we had so much fun making our very own witches' brew. We followed a recipe and each student helped pour an ingredient into a black cauldron. Each ingredient was in a brown bag and labeled. Some of the ingredients included blood drops, cat claws, chicken toenails, witches fingers and much more! They students LOVED stirring the brew in the big black cauldron. When we were all through following our recipe, we were able to sample our gross but yummy brew. Later in the day we graph our favorite ingredients using a bar graph and a tally chart. The students were able to analyze the data from our graph and chart. We also discussed words that described our witches' brew. The students did an excellent job writing a sentence to describe their witches' brew and shared it with the class.

What was your favorite part about the witches' brew lesson... making the brew, eating it, graphing our favorite ingredient or the describing activity?

The review spelling list that was sent home Tuesday night was not intended to go home, but did on accident. I will be sending home a new copy of these words tomorrow. The review list is for the week of October 24th. I apologize if this caused any confusion. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at silottoc@epd86.org.

On Thursday we read the book, I Like Pumpkins. We discussed the fact that even though it was a fiction book it had some factual information in it. After reading the book ,we made some estimations with our class pumpkin. First we estimated how big around it was, then we measured it. Next, we estimated how many lines were on the pumpkin and then we counted them. Finally, we estimated how much we thought the pumpkin weighed then we used the scale to weigh it. You can follow up at home with this lesson by asking your child: 1. What does estimate mean? Is it okay to estimate wrong and why? We would also like you to respond to our blog by asking your child what their favorite part of the lesson was and post it on the class blog. 

Ms. Grant