The Season for Giving

It is so important to teach kids about helping others. Our class has participated in a few different service projects so far this year. We collected sweaters for the Mr. Rogers Sweater Drive, we collected a lot of personal care items and cookies to provide to The Homeless at The City Rescue Mission, and we are currently making cards and a holiday banner to deliver to individuals at a nursing home. I think that our students are definitely seeing that although they may be small, they can help change something for the better! Thank you for helping us teach and model these important life lessons!

Thanksgiving Breakfast

We were so glad to have so many parents, step-parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents at our Thanksgiving Breakfast. We hope each of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving Break! We are so thankful for having the opportunity to be your child's teacher. We just love those little cuties! We had the opportunity to learn about life on a submarine from Mr. Danny who answered all sorts of questions from the kids.

Keeping up with Math

Our Standard Based Bulletin Board this month features our daily work in Calendar Math. We keep a tally of how many days we have been in school. We use this number in many different ways: we count how many groups of tens and how many ones, we talk about the number that comes before and after, we draw this number with tally marks, show this number using different coins, and show this number on the clock in reference to how many hours and minutes. We also have daily story problems in which students have to show their strategies and solve some problems in more than one way or use more than one strategy. Calendar Math teaches and reinforces so many math skills!!

Spelling City!

Test out SpellingCity.com to practice your weekly sight words during Skills Centers and for extra practice at home! There are lots of fun activities that are sure to get your brains excited. Look under our 'Websites to Visit' and SpellingCity is at the top of the list.

Once you get to the site, scroll down to 'Spelling and Vocabulary Lists' and click on Weekly Words. We will be sure to add the words each week so you can be super readers and writers! :)

quick link: SpellingCity

Literacy Character Parade & Fall Party!

After the parade we celebrated Fall with different stations around the room, yummy Fall snacks, and some good Fall fun! Our friends have worked super hard the first nine weeks and deserved to have an awesome day! :)

They create their very own Scarecrow

made some scary monsters









created a mosaic of an acorn









painted fall leaves and finger-painted trees


and created their own necklace and searched for spooky words

Exploring Quadrilaterals with Geboards

Quad-ri-lat-er-al is a pretty biiig word for a First Grade student, but a pretty easy concept to understand. A quadrilateral is simply a polygon with 4 sides. This means any 2-D shape such as the ones pictured below. The table below shows the quadrilaterals we know from exploring with our pattern blocks. Just like when we explored with triangles, the main goal for this lesson was to make sure students understand what a quadrilateral is and to create different types of quadrilaterals on their Geoboards. Our friends totally blew this exploration out of the water!

Exploring Triangles with Geoboards

This week in math we had a blast exploring triangles. It is important for students to understand that triangles are 2-D closed figures (meaning all lines connect) that have 3 straight sides and 3 vertices (our fancy word for corners). Our friends did a fantastic job creating different types of triangles on their Geoboards. Geoboards are plastic and have small pegs on them which hold rubber bands. Students manipulate the rubber bands to make different shapes--and in this case, we created triangles. The main goal of this lesson was to make sure students understand that there are different types of triangles. Not all triangles have equal sides, they can be large or small, and can be positioned many ways. They exercised their brains together and learned a lot from this activity!