First Grade Week 17

Language Arts 

This week we read an interesting expository piece called Lo que comen los animales. The kiddos enjoyed learning about some of the different eating habits of various animals. Ask your kiddo to tell you how many hours a day a Panda eats. A vocabulary word we discussed was alimentos/food, nourishment.

In preparation for their Spanish Animal report and expository writing that the students will be writing, we talked about the main idea/idea principal. We also discussed how details in our writing must support our main idea.

Statements, questions and exclamations were the three types of sentences discussed this week. The kiddos had fun coming up with their own exclamations and sharing them with the whole class! We learned that statements are most likely the types of sentences they will be using in their expository writing.

La Estrella del día or star of the day was a student that was presented with a special sticker for speaking a LOT of Spanish or putting forth the biggest effort to speak Spanish in class. A different child was chosen each day. Thank you to those that have been signing their kiddo’s planner when they speak Spanish at home! I always make a big deal out of it in class and love to recognize the kids and they love it!

Math

In Math we took a pretest on Numbers 1-40. This was a multiple choice test and gave the kiddos practice in taking multiple choice exams. We also reviewed i/tens and unidades/ones. We also reviewed the relationship of the tens and ones to valor posiciónal/place value. I gave them a two digit number and they practiced identifying the number in the tens place and the number in the ones place. They also used unifix cubes to demonstrate a number’s value.

Social Studies & Science

This week we’re learning about the Maya civilization.  We located where they lived, Mexico and Central America, on a map and discussed what their climate was like.  We learned about how the grew maize, how they traveled in canoes, and how they had large cities like Baakal.  We also learned that they were polytheistic, like the Egyptians and Mesopotamians.  We colored some Maya art designs and worked on our class civilization chart and timeline.  On Friday I wasn’t feeling well and had no voice, so Miss Jill was my hero and took our class.   She did some Martin Luther King activities with the class and a directed drawing lesson.

English Spelling

This week we continued to work with last weeks sorts.  Everyone sorted their words each day and then chose an activity to do with them.  Some chose to write them down in alphabetical order, some practiced spelling them with a partner, and others wrote their words 3 times.

In our journal we wrote about our social studies read a loud.  The students made predictions on what they thought would happen to Kenal’s village after the hurricane hit and wrote about it.  We also wrote about Mr. Chuck’s visit to our class and what we learned about stranger danger.

Art

The first graders continued working on their winter birch tree project. They cut out 2 or 3 tree trunk shapes from the textured papers that they made last week. They glued the tree trunks and branches to a blue background. Then the students used the tissue­paper-colored paper from last week to cut out shapes for birds. We looked at some of Eric Carle’s art to see how he used several pieces of colored paper to create different animals. These beautiful winter scenes are almost finished!

Music

Songs featuring sleepy critters, Teddy Bear’s Picnic and Mi Palomar, were today’s focus, and we followed that theme to sleeping in heavenly peace and other songs about sleep. This led to a discussion of differences in translated versions of songs. For instance, did Rudolph’s nose look like a light bulb or a tomato?