October Update

Hi everyone!  I wanted to give you an update of some of the things we have been doing this past month.  It seemed to fly by and it's been very exciting to watch the boys and girls improving day-by-day.

We began the month with Fire Safety Prevention activities.  The fire department visited our school and we got to see a fire fighter dress in his uniform.  Students even got to look through the thermal imaging camera!

 

Following this assembly we wrote about fire fighters.  The kiddos have been working hard on giving evidence or reasons to support statements they make in their writing.

 

 As a fun conclusion to our fire safety week, we built a delicious firetruck!

 Next on the calendar was Columbus Day.  We read all kinds of books about this early explorer and wrote down the facts we learned about him.  We discussed what it means to be an explorer and the tools important to him or her.

 

 

 

After discussing Columbus and his travels we read the book shown above and then made a "flap book" of maps.  Students had to illustrate each flap with the appropriate picture or map.

 Our main book study for the month was a series of books starring a favorite character of ours called "Scaredy Squirrel."  He is afraid of many, many things and consequently is not a risk taker.  We discussed what it means to take risks, and how good learners do this every day in their reading and writing.

 While reading these books, we focused on the character traits of Scaredy Squirrel and compared them to ourselves.

Continuing with our emphasis on giving reasons or evidence when writing, (which is an important part of the new Common Core State Standards) the kiddos wrote about why he should not be afraid.

After reading a story about Scaredy Squirrel's birthday, everyone thought of a gift they would give him.  After making a list of adjectives they wrote about the gift and decorated a colorful "gift box."

The 1st grade classes also participated in a "hand washing" poster project after we learned the proper procedure for good hand washing.  The Health Department will visit our school soon to view the posters we made.  I was so proud of the boys and girls as they were totally in charge of completing their poster all by themselves.  They did a terrific job.  

We have also done a writing project involving facts about bats and been doing more character comparisons with a couple of Halloween related stories.  I will post more about these next time along with what we've been doing in math.  This coming week will be filled with Halloween activities, parties, and a parade of costumed girls and boys.  Look for more pictures soon!

Apples, Apples Everywhere!

For the past couple of weeks we have been enjoying the approaching fall season with all that comes with it!  My kiddos have been bringing in bags of colorful leaves, acorns, seed pods of all kinds, and other "treasures" they have found.  Mrs. Nelson even brought in a praying mantis to look at!

We read many books about the changes that occur in the fall and wrote poems about fall using our five senses.  

We have also been learning about non-fiction text features as we read books about apple trees.

We learned about CAPTIONS.

We learned about BOLD PRINT.

 We learned about LABELS.

Of course, in honor of John Chapman's birthday (a.k.a. Johnny Appleseed) we read many books about this fascinating American folk hero and wrote our own favorite facts about him.  Students created their own picture too!

We spent one day in math measuring the height and width of apples, comparing the weight to our partner's apple, estimating and counting the seeds in the apples, sketching the pattern we saw in the middle of the apple, and after cutting the apple into fractions and recording those, everyone got to taste their apple.  Here are some pictures:

All in all, we had some fun and delicious first days of fall!