W.O.W!! It's the interesting word of the week...

 For the past two weeks, our first grade students have been practicing being able to communicate with rich vocabularies. We are focusing on a new word each week and trying to practice using it meaningfully as often as possible. Families can help at home by trying to use our new words, too.

Last week's word was opinion...

This week's word is loyal...

RES Red Clover Book Award Results

This is a guest post by RES teacher librarian Beth Redford.

 RES Red Clover Winning Book:

The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt

All school year, RES scholars have been sharing the 10 excellent picture books on the 2014-2015 Red Clover Award reading list. Every year the Vermont Center for the Book puts together a new reading list of 10 fiction and nonfiction picture books for this award, which is named after our state flower. Vermont students in kindergarten through fourth grade read, listen to, discuss, and write about the books on the list. Then each student votes for his or her favorite.

Discussing Red Clover books in Grade One library class

 Another popular title: Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great 

by Bob Shea

Discussing Red Clover books in Grade One library class

This year's Red Clover winner at RES, by a large margin, was The Day the Crayons Quit by Drew Daywalt. Scholars couldn't wait to reread their favorite parts of this story about a rebellious box of crayons who complain to their owner: "Try coloring inside the lines," "tell Yellow and Orange to stop arguing over which one is the color of the sun," or "pick a different favorite color, I'm worn down to a nub!" This funny book is an excellent example of character development, perspective and voice, and it kept our first and second graders laughing all winter. Other popular titles were Unicorn Thinks He's Pretty Great by Bob Shea, Papa's Mechanical Fish by Candace Fleming, and The Mighty Lalouche by Matthew Olshan (Mrs. Redford's favorite to read aloud with a bad French accent).

Once we have collected the last few Red Clover votes from RES, these votes will go to the Vermont Center for the Book. The VCB will add our votes together with votes from elementary schools all over Vermont. The top vote-getter from the whole state will be declared the Red Clover Award Winner for 2015. More information about the Red Clover program is available at the Red Clover Website.

We are very proud of our scholars and their hard work in reading and evaluating this year's Red Clover books!

Math Highlights

Upon our return from the winter break, we began a new unit in math, Unit 6 "Number Games and Crayon Puzzles".  This is a number sense unit and includes a strong focus on learning the combinations to make 10, problem solving while developing strategies for combining numbers, and continued work on addition and subtraction, including solving for missing addends.  Over the past few days first graders have been doing many activities working with the pairs of numbers that equal 10.  Some even extended their learning to see the relationship between the 10s facts and how they apply to adding larger numbers.  

Tens Rainbows

Making Tens

Playing Counters in a Cup

Playing Tens Go Fish

Cold Smoothies!!

On the last day before winter vacation our class finished earning "cold smoothies" for showing expected behavior over the past month or so.  We were finally able to enjoy them today!!  Some yummy cold smoothies on a very cold day!!