Happy New Year!

Wishing everyone a happy, healthy, and wonderful new year!




Blinkie courtesy of Barb over on Ruby Slippers Blog Designs!

Season's Greetings!

Our last week of school before break came to a screeching halt with a snow blizzard causing early dismissal which was followed by our first snow day.  We went ahead with the student gift exchange a day early and it's a good thing that we did.

I thought I should fill you in on the final week of holiday activities in our classroom before we begin the new year so here goes...

We read Santa's New Suit by Laura Rader and then designed our own suits for Santa.  Using transition words like "first," "next," "then," and "finally" we wrote step-by-step directions describing how we designed his new suit.  They turned out very cute!

Gifts for parents were also on our agenda.  We made reversible Santa/Christmas tree ornaments thanks to Mrs. Hodson at Today in First Grade.

We also made these beautiful "stained glass" ornaments using permanent markers on transparency film backed with aluminum foil.

Of course, no gift is complete without a card and my little "elves" really created some gorgeous ones for their parents!  

Each year I look forward to reading "The Polar Express" by Chris Van Allsburg  and following-up with some fun activities.  This year, after reading the story to my kids, we discussed and wrote summaries for the beginning, middle, and end of the story.    Students also worked with partners to make as many words as they could using the letters from the title.  This turned into a fun contest between groups as they tried to be the first to fill the recording sheet.  I was truly amazed at the words each group came up with.  I have some super smart kids!!

Unfortunately, due to the storm we didn't get to watch the movie this year.  After making sure all of the boys and girls were bundled up, we had an early dismissal and began our Christmas break a day early.

I hope that your time with family and friends has been fun and that you are enjoying your break from school.  I will see you soon!  Take care!  Happy New Year!

Santa, Elves, and the Three Bears

Last week was full of excitement as we get nearer to Christmas!  It is so much fun to see the sparkle in the eyes of each boy and girl as they contemplate a visit from Santa, or just anticipate the special time with their families.  We would like to share some of the activities that took place in our classroom.
We began by reading "The Littlest Elf"  and did some vocabulary, matching, labeling, and scrambled sentence activities.

Of course, we have written letters to Santa!

To continue our work with word choice, we listened to "The Wild Christmas Reindeer"
                                           
and then completed a "job application" for the position of taking care of Santa's reindeer.  We used this to write an opinion/persuasive style narrative of why we would make a good elf to take care of Santa's reindeer.

Keeping with the theme of Santa's reindeer we read the book "Olive, the Other Reindeer" 

                                                  

and  followed up with a story retelling organizer completing the headings of "Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Finally."

We also learned about past, present, and future verbs using a fun activity thanks to Shawna Devoe:

        

We also practiced alphabetizing Santa's reindeer's names while creating this cute reindeer:

To continue our work with verbs we wrote about what we would do if Santa was stuck in our chimney after reading the story, "Santa's Stuck"   and created a funny "chimney" topper to go with it thanks to Cheryl at Primary Graffiti:

We also compared similarities and differences in the following two stories:"Goldilocks and the Three Bears" by James Marshall and "Santa and the Three Bears" by Domonic Catalano.

               

In math we practiced building yummy "plane" shapes with pretzels and marshmallows! We discussed the number of sides and corners while also learning the correct names of the shapes.

One week until we are on break!

   

I want to join, with all of my fellow bloggers, in this day of silence to honor those in Newtown, Connecticut.  This poem from Erica Bohrer's blog does a wonderful job of summing up our sentiments:





Let's keep all of those families in our thoughts and prayers.

Merry Christmas from All of Us!

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Gingerbread Week!

We spent an entire week immersed in the land of gingerbread!

             

We read a variety of gingerbread stories and compared the characters, chant, and ending of each.  The boys and girls became experts at making even more contrasts and comparisons as the week went along.  Here is a picture of the chart we made:

Students used a graphic organizer as they wrote a story making sure it included a beginning, middle, and end.  The story was in repsonse to the prompt:  "Where would you run to if you were the gingerbread boy/girl?"

We also took advantage of this yummy treat to do some graphing.  Students used a variety of graphs to display and interpret data after they took just one bite off of their cookie. Here is a picture of our "pie" graph:

Everyone enjoyed becoming "scientists" as students were presented with the question of "what do you think would have happened to the gingerbread boy if he would have swam across the river?"

Students had to write a "hypothesis" and design an experiment to prove it. During the experiment students drew pictures of their results, wrote directions for the experiment including materials needed and procedure, and wrote a conclusion including whether they proved their hypothesis and what they could infer from the results.  Use of adjectives and verbs was emphasized throughout the   writing.

It was a yummy good time!

   

All Things Reindeer

We have been as busy as Santa's elves here in 1st Grade the past couple of weeks!  I apologize ahead of time for the long post, but we have so much to share with you!

While learning what animals do to prepare for the winter months we read several books about hibernation, migration, and adaptation.  Of course, everyone was very exited to learn all about reindeer at this time of year!  First, we brainstormed all of  things we knew about reindeer.  Then, after reading Remarkable Reindeer by J. Bauer, and after watching some videos showing reindeer herding, migration, and reindeer races, we checked our list and added more facts.  Students used this list to aid in writing facts about reindeer complete with an illustration.

We also read a delightful story about Santa trying to find the perfect animal to pull his sleigh titled Who Will Guide My Sleigh Tonight?   He tries everything from kangaroos to butterflies.  After listening to the story, students wrote about the animal they would choose to pull their sleigh.  Here are some examples:

Next, we spent several days learning about "circle stories" by reading and discussing books by Laura Numeroff such as: If You Give a Dog a Donut, If You Give a Pig a Pancake, and If You Give a Cat a Cupcake, and If You Take a Mouse to School.
         


We had a day of activity around another Numeroff circle story    "If You Take a Mouse to the Movies."  Students enjoyed creating their own mice to attach to a  written response to the question:  "What would you want if you went to the movies?"  Thanks to Mrs. Carroll at The First Grade Parade for the wonderful ideas!

We also created a "filmstrip" version of this story:

In math we decorated a Christmas tree with addition and subtraction facts on popcorn garlands using fact families:

We also completed a word family word sort activity:

Then, thanks to a great idea from Sarah Cooley over at First Grader At Last, we created some cute reindeer and wrote our own version of "If You Give a Reindeer Some Rootbeer" and made some cute reindeer.

Here is our story:

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In math we created reindeer and Christmas trees using 2-D shapes.

We hope you enjoyed looking at all of our reindeer things!