Here are a few announcements/reminders as we begin a new month:
- Square One Art orders can be picked up at school on Tuesday, December 13th from 4:00-7:00 in the art room. This is the same night as the 4th and 5th grade music concert.
- Report cards will come home in your child's folder on Friday, December 2nd. Please let me know if you have any questions when you receive your child's report card.
- During the month of December, we are going to focus on Random Acts of Kindness in our classroom. I will be sending home a calendar of possible activities that your child could complete at home or in the community. Please have your child color the activities that she/he completes and return the calendar after winter break so that we can discuss our random acts of kindness as a class. We will also be doing a few other kindness activities as a class. I will be sending home a note about that soon!
Literacy:
During the month of November, we learned about short u and short e word families. We continued to work on our first list of snap words. This week, students have the opportunity to complete "word work centers" for the first time. Ask your child about some of our new centers! Here is a peek at some of the fun activities that we did to practice our words!
Rainbow Words:
Pyramid Word Writing:
Word Race:
Building words with magnetic letters:
Building words using beads and pipe cleaners:
We also completed a fun scavenger hunt in the classroom. While the students were at their specials class, I hid Short U words around the classroom. Students used clip boards to find all of the words and write them under the matching word family.
One of the students' favorite activities is using the spinning wheel to spin word families. Students each get a turn to spin. The wheel has word families like "at" or "ick" and then everyone writes a word from that word family on their whiteboards.
In November, we learned that nouns are words that are people, places, or things. Students worked in partner groups to look for nouns in the books in their book bins. They wrote down as many as they could on their sheets!
Students worked on their comprehension skills by writing about the beginning, middle, and end of a story that I read to the class. Students made little flip books about the story!
I am always so impressed by how much first graders LOVE to read. I couldn't resist taking this picture of these kids reading after they finished their work!
Math:
Here are some of the key skills that we worked on in November:
- Telling time to the hour (and we recently added half hours)
- Math facts that equal ten
- Skip counting on a number grid
- Basic addition and subtraction
- Counting coins with nickels and pennies (we add dimes soon!)
- Reading graphs and tally charts
Skip counting on the number grid:
Number sorting activity:
Roll and Add Thanksgiving page!
Writing numbers before and after:
Number grid puzzles:
New tangram game on the ipads:
Making Thanksgiving graphs:
Science:
In science, we finished learning about air and weather. Students observed the clouds and the wind outside. We put a rain gauge in the school garden so that we can measure rain fall. We tested wind speed and direction by using bubbles. Here's some pictures of the kids using their bubbles to learn about wind.
During the 2nd trimester, we will learn about Balance and Motion in science. I hope that you enjoyed this peek into our classroom! Please let me know if you have any questions!
