Leverett School Grade 1 Joyful Learning For Young Children 

We have a new person in our classroom!  Tina has joined our class as a student teacher from UMASS.  She will be with us until April and she sent a letter home today introducing herself to 1st Grade families.  She started to do things like lead classroom meeting and here she is at morning meeting with some of the kids who brought in a 100 Day of School project.  We’ve had a few great projects come in already.  Please send them in by next Friday.    

We’ve also started studying BEARS as part of our life science curriculum.  Students will do research and find out how these animals adapt to their habitat, how they survive and any special characteristics.  Children broke into groups and chose to study either a Polar, Grizzly, Black or Panda Bear.  We started reading books and taking notes, learning how to “throw out the trash and keep the treasure” words when recording notes and not to copy what is in the book.  This is a huge challenge for our young readers and writers but they are doing it!  You would be amazed!!  Each student will create their own chapter book about the bear they studied and each group will create a poster to teach others about their bear.  We also used Kid Pix on the computer to create a picture of our bears, with labels and notes to tell one fact we’ve learned already.  Here are some pictures below. More to come!

 

Today we finished several days work of studying Martin Luther King, Jr.  The children read books about his life, made a book writing about what they learned, drew pictures to illustrate his most famous words and wrote letters to him.  Much of this work is now hanging on the bulletin board outside our classroom.  Come take a look!  Before we left school today we had a closing circle, where everyone passed the “magic wand” (only the person who holds the wand can talk) and said one thing they learned or admired about MLK.  The children shared words like Nobel Peace Prize Winner, rule changer, segregation, preacher, someone with a dream, someone who helped the world, marcher for equal rights, worked for fairness, taught us to fight without our hands…..and much more.  These 6/7 year olds continue to impress me everyday!  What a beautiful way to end our study of such a famous American.  Ask your child about it.

Come take a walk through math workshop this week!  We pulled out our beautiful Montessori counting beads to learn a new game called Snake Game.  It helps children learn their 10’s combinations and 10’s and 1’s.  It also makes the kids feel very smart because they are using the beads to help them add together several addends in a really long number sentence!

The kids are working on their number scrolls writing numbers up to 100 and beyond.  One child is already in the 800’s!  His number scroll is almost as tall as he is!

 

Here is a Bingo game helping us practice learning to tell time to the hour and 1/2 hour.   

 

The favorite Montessori 100 Board.  Kids never seem to get tired of this one.  They seem to be noticing new patterns all the time.

Race To The Pond.  A game using 2 dice that helps reinforce addition sentences up to 12.  

Several kids are using Symphony Math every day on the computers.  This is something you can access at home, too.  It is an excellent reinforcement of 1st Grade math skills.  Many children find it challenging.  The levels get increasingly hard the better your child becomes at each skill so it is individualized for each student. It’s a great way for your kids to get used to new math vocabulary and some kids even think it is FUN!  An added bonus!

And, our counting by 5’s and 10’s train.

 

 

Math tests went home this week for Unit 4. Please note how your child did and review whatever may have been hard for him/her.   We will begin Unit 5 next week.

We are happily back at school and trying to stay warm after this cold start to our New Year!  To ease back in, we have spent a lot of time this week reading beautiful winter stories by Jan Brett.  On Wednesday the children chose which book was their favorite and they wrote about it.  We put the stories together to make a class book.  Each 1st grader created side pictures to go with their story, just like Jan Brett does.

 

 

Today we had a late start to the day, so we had a short day.  We spent time playing a math game to help us get ready for our end of unit math test tomorrow.  You will see them coming home soon.

We also continued work on our teaching books, doing a self assessment on what we were doing well and what we needed to improve upon in our writing.

During choice time, many students were busy making snowmen to decorate our windows in the classroom and to take home.

Hope you are having a happy, healthy start to 2015!