Lots of things!

Sorry for the blogging hiatus! I wanted to take a minute to update you about things going on in our class! We have been working hard in writing on our non-fiction books! I am so impressed with how many things first graders are experts about.  Many of them also take responsibility for their learning by using books from the library to help them teach their readers and have learned about many non-fiction text features like captions, labels, close ups, headings, and will soon begin talking about putting in a table of contents.  The students are enjoying this writing unit and I am seeing tremendous growth!

In science, we have learned about our earth, the moon, and the sun! Below you will see a picture of the students making a play-doh model of the earth's layers.  Thank you to the parents who sent in play-doh for this project! It was quite a hit! Our new unit is an ocean discovery so get ready to learn facts about sharks, whales, and other ocean life!

We have had a few opportunities to utilize the ipads in our classroom lately.  We have worked on asking questions before, during, and after we read. With ipads and a thinking partner, we illustrated the question we had and the answer we found in the text!

Students on the 100th day of school!

Jump Rope for Heart!

Making the layers of the Earth with play-doh!

Showing our learning and wonderings with an ipad and thinking partner!

Also, we recently showed our new learning from the most recent Fundations (phonics and spelling) unit by taking our assessment on an ipad app called Screen Chomp.  The students were told the words to spell, and then they had to mark their words and explain why they marked them a certain way.  The final products were emailed to me by the students so that I could see how well they understood! 

Here is one student's learning: 

Fundations Screen Chomp

Finally, our spring concert is April 24th at 2:30.  Hope you can make it to hear your sweet children sing!

Christmas things!

Friday was very festive at school! We made reindeer food that Jingles brought us and reindeer antler hats! Thank you to all of those who donated to the Hesed House! They were very grateful to receive your gifts:) 

Three States Of Matter

We had a fun time exploring properties of solids! We learned they can be soft or hard, rough or smooth, etc. We also learned solids keep their shape unlike liquids. Some students shared;however, that they know of solids that can melt into liquids like ice and chocolate. Here are some kids sorting their solids based on different properties!

After sorting, we got to work with our table groups to create a structure that could stand. This allowed the students to learn about what kind of materials are stronger, should be a base, etc. We may have some future engineers or architects in room 101! 

Book Detectives

This week, we began practicing a new skill during our Read to Someone Center.  The students have buckets of books to choose from to practice reading to a buddy.  Their new job; however, is to begin noticing "cool" things or interesting things the author does with the words.  We are beginning to learn about text features when we are reading and putting text features into our writing. These two students shared what they observed in their books.

Mia found that the author is using a different verb in the same sentence that is repeated on each page!

Joshua discovered that the author used the illustration to also write words. Cool!

Point of View

We reread two of our favorite books today and discussed what point of view the authors were using when they wrote. We discussed key words that would help us identify who was talking, and we learned the word narrator. Knowing who is telling the story helps us to further understand what the book is about! 

And check out what Jingles was doing this morning! 

 He was practicing reading to someone just like us! 

Rewind to our Turkey Stories!

With Christmas quickly approaching (21 days, but who's counting? :)  ) I wanted to take a minute to rewind a little and share a few of the AWESOME turkey adventure stories that were produced in room 101! The students decorated very fancy turkeys to disguise hunters from catching them for Thanksgiving.  We worked through brainstorming ideas about what they could be disguised as and talked through how to create a topic sentence for our story.  We discussed how important a topic sentence can be because it helps their readers know exactly what they will be reading about! After I modeled a topic sentence, students wrote their own and shared.  We then worked through how to sequence events in our stories using transition words or temporal words in their writing.  Many kids used first, then, and last.

Our Elf!

A special delivery came today from the North Pole! We read our new book and voted on our elf's name. Check out our chart to see the winner:)