Leverett School Grade 1 Joyful Learning For Young Children 

A couple of our reading groups are reading books about famous American heroes.  These books present challenging concepts and vocabulary to young readers, introducing them to a diverse group of famous Americans.  Children are writing about these books and talking about what they read.  

A few more people practicing their skills adding and subtracting by 10’s on our 100 Board by filling in numbers in columns.  Today we learned about symbols that help make TRUE math equations.  (=, >, <)  You will see them on tonight’s homework.

 

Our Bear Research is underway.  We are studying all the adaptations bears have that help them survive in their habitat.  Kids have broken up into 4 groups, each researching a different bear.  Ask your child which bear he/she is studying.  We finished our research notes this week and now are starting to write about what we learned so we can teach others.

 

Here are more creative designs from this week.  The more I took notice of them, the more amazed I was.  Especially this cup holder, created to hold our fluoride cups!

 

A few tests were sent home this week.  An end of unit Math test and an end of unit Fundations test.

Please take a look at them and let me know if you have questions about your child’s progress.  Report Cards will also be coming home next week.  Conferences are not scheduled until April, but if you have questions or concerns about your child’s progress after reading the report card, please feel free to be in touch.  I’d be happy to talk to you about it.

 

Have a great weekend!

A student teacher asked me recently, “How do you incorporate creativity into your curriculum and into the children’s day?”  What a great question.  It really made me think.  At this time of year, many children (and teachers!) can become weary from all the mid-year assessments that take place right before report cards are sent home.  So it seems like a perfect time to highlight the ways we try to allow each day for creativity to be a part of the school day.  Part of our science goals in engineering and technology is for children to be able to generate multiple solutions to a design problem.  To give children practice in this skill we start each day with time for building original structures, using a variety of materials like K’Nex, Legos and Pattern Blocks.

 

We end each day with choice time, which is a time for creative play where children choose their own activity.  Here are kids busy at blocks, art, computers, clay and pretend.

Our first 100 Day of School activity was completed before school today and shared with the class!

 

And here is a shout out to our specialists.  Miss Boss, our recently retired art teacher, made these beautiful silk screen shirts with the kids.  They will be coming home with the children today.

Creativity, design and play is an important part of  first grade!

Our “experts” continue to come up and share their non-fiction writing with the class.  We call them teaching books.  The kids know about so many topics!  And, of course, they LOVE being experts on these topics.  After they share their work, they often take questions and comments from their friends.  Yesterday we used the program Kid Pix in computer lab to make covers for our teaching books.  Soon each child will have a non-fiction book to add to our classroom library.  Ask your child what she/he is writing about.  You may even want to brainstorm a list with your child of topics of interest she/he may want to write an expert book on.  We can keep the lists in their writing folders to help when they are choosing a new topic to write about in the next few weeks.

In math we are working on strategies for adding and subtracting numbers.  Each day we choose one number and come up with many ways to get to that number.  (+1, +0, +10, -10, etc…)

This is our 100 Board.  We are learning how to add and subtract 10 by filling in the numbers in columns.

We are learning how to represent our thinking in a variety of ways.  There are many ways to get to the same answer!

 

We are learning our combinations of 10 and strategies we can use to remember them all, like using turn around facts.  Or listing them in a certain way, like increasing or decreasing each number by one.  Ask your child if they can name all the partners that make 10 and then practice them at home.

 

Mrs. Gallegher continues to come in to teach us about how we can make difficult social situations better by being aware of others feelings and being aware of the language we use with others.  We are writing different endings to stories to make it a better ending for all involved.  Then we share our different endings with the class.  

 

And finally, our new science unit has been launched.  We are studying Bears and what they need to survive in their habitat.  This week we focused on the word HABITAT.  We read books and watched a short video about what animals need from a habitat:  food, water, space, shelter.  Then we drew pictures that are hanging in the hall now.  Come take a look at them!

 

Hello and welcome back to our First Grade News! We had a new student teacher join us this week from Antioch.  His name is Mark and he will be with us Mondays – Wednesdays until April break.  He’ll be popping up in our pictures soon.

We are back at work here in school.  I love this time of year because for the most part, all of the kids have adjusted to our classroom routines and things are running smoothly.  Everyone is reading away and today as I sat down to do mid year reading assessments, I was struck by the progress each child has made as a reader.  We continue to meet in reading groups 4 days a week to read books at our level.  

We are beginning to write about books more, and study the different parts of books like the title, setting, characters, problem and solution.  

 

This week we focused on Jan Brett books since she has written so many lovely winter stories.  And we also started our unit on Bears.  Comparing how fiction is different from non-fiction.    We will use Bears as a way to study how animals of the same kind can be so different.  We will talk about the adaptations each kind of bear has to help it survive in its habitat.  

In writing, we have started our non-fiction writing unit.  Today kids made a list of all the topics they are an “expert” on and could write a teaching book about.  Then they began to write about one topic.  A few experts came up in front of the room to read their teaching books to the class, putting on our special “expert hat” and using the magic wand to point to certain important facts.  

 

You’ll hear more about all these things in weeks to come.

Happy New Year!