First Grade Week 11

by | Nov 14, 2015 | In The Loop

Language Art 

This week we continued practice using the table of contents while reading as a class and while doing our individual reading. We also practiced using imagery. During whole class reading I had the kids either close their eyes or draw what they heard happening in the story before showing them any of the illustrations. Then we shared our ideas and drawings with each other. I used this time to also briefly introduce comparing and contrasting with our different drawings and ideas. The kids loved being able to draw their own illustrations to the stories we read in class. Next week we will use the imagery we learned to create a sequel to the story Llueve (Rain) in class. Each student will write and illustrate their own short story.

We also began working with new morning worksheets. These worksheets focus on certain sounds. This week we worked with Bb and Ff. Each worksheet contains a short story of only a few sentences with some follow up questions. Each student has shown that they can read and understand the story on their own, which is fantastic! What I am really looking for is each student to create full sentences to answer each follow up question instead of single word answers. We discussed different strategies such as using the words in the question itself to answer as well as checking back to the story.

Math

In math this week we discussed subtraction with the number 0. We recalled that in addition any number plus zero will be the original number. We also talked about how in addition the order of the two numbers does not affect our result. We then used counters to figure out if these same rules applied to subtraction. Together we found out that any number minus zero will equal the original number but that we cannot subtract a number from zero. We discussed how zero is a special number because of this. We also did more “tests” with our counters and found that the order of our numbers in a subtraction problem is very important and that we must pay close attention to it.

We worked with subtraction story problems this week. We used the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday as a topic for our subtraction math stories. The kids understood these stories right away and it even helped others develop a more concrete understanding of subtraction.

IMG_20151113_103929547I hope everyone was able to see our math turkeys on our bulletin board as they show several ways to represent numbers to build addition and subtraction sentences that all have the same result. The kids had so much fun figuring out their math sentences and then using different ways to represent them. We were even able to use numbers from 11-20 instead of 1-10 without any trouble.

20151113_145926Social Studies & Science

This week we have continued to learn about the ocean habitat in our Science domain unit.  We have begun making some fun sea animals and writing about them.  On Tuesday we dropped our Sea Monkey eggs into their little aquarium.  I had to explain several times that despite the name, we would would not be seeing fury little aquatic monkeys swimming around in our tank.  We discussed how these animals are actually a type of Brine Shrimp witch is a form of zoo plankton.  We eagerly (myself included) await to see what these little guys are going to be like.  This week we also have been talking about habitat destruction and endangered species.  Its wonderful to hear how passionate our class is about protecting the planet and its creatures!  As a class we are trying to decide on a conservation activity that we can do, one of the more popular ideas is to adopt a sloth.
In our Early World Civilizations unit we have begun reading about the three major world religions.  We started off by reviewing the difference between a polytheistic and monotheistic faiths, multiple gods vs one god.  We discussed how the three religions we will be learning about are monotheistic and how they all began in the Middle East.  We talked about how Jerusalem is considered a holy city by all three of these religions and we looked at pictures of the Western Wall (“Wailing Wall”),  the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the Dome of the Rock.  On Tuesday we read more ineptly about Judaism.  We talked about some of this religions holidays and holy symbols.  The class learned some new vocabulary such as rabbi, synagogue, Torah, and Shabbat to name a few.  We began working on a comparison chart to better understand the three religions we are studying.  I would love to invite some guest speakers into the class to discuss their traditions associated with the three religions, especially in the context of world history.  If you or someone you know would be interested please let me know.
 English Spelling/Grammar review

Along with working on our sorts and journals this week, we have been doing assessments to get ready for report cards and conferences.  Each student has been reading with me individually and as a class we did a spelling assessment.  We did a some grammar work with nouns this week.  The class worked on recognizing what a noun was and identifying proper nouns  and common ones.   Next week we will begin writing our Animal Habitat reports.