So much fun and learning this week in first grade!!
We:
Completed our fifth Word Detective Mission and earned our Secret Word Detective badges!
“Flew” from Germany to Sweden to continue our travels
Read The Gingerbread Baby by Jan Brett, learned that gingerbread is a traditional holiday food in both Germany and Sweden, and designed our own gingerbread houses
Learned about the Northern Lights and painted them
Learned about the celebration of Saint Lucia Day
Learned how to use transition words in our “How to…” books
Learned about the suffix s and that the letter s can sometimes sound like a z
Learned about balanced equations and how to figure out if an equation is true or false
“flew” to Germany to continue learning about customs and traditions around the world during this time of year like Saint Nikolaus Day, The Nutcracker, and other facts about the country.
Learned about the -all family of words during word study and continued practicing the -am and -an families. We call them “glued sounds”.
Worked on math problems with three addends and practiced the strategy of looking for tens facts or doubles facts to add together first
Learned more about maps and ordinal directions
Played a game using ordinal directions and learned a little about how to use a compass during our outdoor learning time
Continued working on writing How to… books
On Tuesday we "flew" to Germany to learn about customs and traditions going on there during this time of year. We loved watching the videos of their Christmas markets!
In our "airplane seats" watching out inflight videos.
We learned about their celebration of Saint Nikolaus Day on December 6. Children leave their shoes on their doorsteps in hopes of finding some treats in them the next day. We tried it out by making some paper shoes and found some treats in them the next morning! We also learned about the Nutcracker story, watched some parts of the ballet, and made some nutcracker puppets.
During math, we learned about adding three addends together, along with some helpful strategies to make it as efficient as possible like looking for tens facts and doubles facts to add together first.
During our Outdoor Learning time, we played a game to practice using the ordinal directions and compass rose. We also learned a little about how to use a compass and had fun trying to walk to the true north! We took a peaceful walk through the forest to notice the freshly fallen snow on the trees and plants. So beautiful!! Since it was a pretty chilly morning we headed inside to do our puppet show. We learned that while animals don't have an actual compass to help guide them like humans do, they do have various innate abilities to help them find their way when migrating or finding their way from their food sources back to their homes. Very interesting!
Of course, we had to take some time to make some snow angels!!
Writing our Friday Letters from Germany this week!
Working on our "How to..." books.
We accomplished Mission #4 this week during our reading workshop!
We are getting close to becoming official Word Detectives!!
After the month-long Read-a-Thon and our annual used book sale, RES concluded with a little reading celebration known as D.E.A.R. (Drop Everything And Read). So that's exactly what we did!!
By the way, the book sale raised over $2,000 to help families in need in our community!!
A Few Classroom Notes:
- Please remember to label all of your child's clothing and outdoor gear.
- Our classroom could use more Chlorox / Lysol type wipes to clean our tabletops at the end of the day if anyone is able to donate some.
