First Grade Week 7

by | Oct 17, 2015 | In The Loop

Language Arts 

We had such a fun week in language arts! We played Veo, Veo (Eye Spy) this week, which the kids loved. It was especially helpful to need to find objects that start with a certain letter in Spanish. We found out that there are a lot of things around the classroom that begin with the letter A and M, yet there were only a few things that began with the letter K. During reading we reviewed syllables again, as this seems to be very helpful when we write our complete sentences. While reading at home have your child figure out how many syllables are in some of the more complicated words. We did a lot of work this week with high frequency words, making sure that we remember all the ones we learned last year and adding on some new ones as well. This week we worked with the word aunque (although) and según (according to). See if you can get your child to use these sometime this weekend! I know there has been some confusion with the students reading binders. I will be reorganizing the books this weekend so we can be back on track Monday. Thank you for your patience. Have a great weekend!

Math

This week we started our addition facts up to the number 10. The students are recalling addition very easily and I am very confident that we will be able to do much bigger addition facts very soon. Again, we are focusing on counting on when we add. This is a very important skill for all the students to master as it will make algebra easier to understand later. We played a flash card math game in class on Friday with our addition facts up to 10. The kids are already beginning to memorize some common math facts even without any instruction. I also introduced math sentence building. We are working on making sure to have complete math sentences which include 3 numbers (the two we are adding and a result), the operation (in this case addition), and an equals sign. Even though it was a bit confusing the first day to “build sentences” in math the students quickly learned that it is a lot like the sentences we write in Language Arts. Continue working at home with simple addition facts. We will be doing math story problems next week, so if you happen across some addition at home make sure to talk about it!

20151013_104121Social Studies & Science

What a fabulous field trip to Zenger farm this week.  Thank you to all the parents that powered through the traffic to get their kiddos there and for joining us on our adventure.  Thanks to Miss Jill too, for finding this wonderful gem.  The students had so much fun learning about animals and plants on the farm, they even got to taste a few things.  They also seemed to enjoy getting their hands dirty and helping out with the farm work.  In class we made a word bank with all the things we learned  on the farm, breaking it down into plants, animals, and habitats.  We used these lists to help us write in our journals and make a class book titled  Down By Zenger Farm.
We continued to learn about the rain forest this week.  Students got to finish their mini book that they began with Miss Jennie last week and then practiced reading it in class on Tuesday.  We have been observing how our classes’ mini rain forest seems to be making its own “rain”.  Students noticed that  there is condensation on the inside of the container and 20151016_141637water is dripping off the plants.  We read several books about the rain forest this week, the students compared and contrasted the books. The students got a special treat of observing some visiting turtle, Atticus and Einstein, in their mini habitat.  We even had a chance to do a turtle race with the kindergartners.
In Social Studies this week we were finishing up our lesson about people of the Nile and how they communicated through writing in the form of hieroglyphics.  Next week the class will get a chance to do some of their own Egyptian writing.  We added hieroglyphics and farming to our civilization chart and compared these to the Mesopotamian farming and cuneiform.
English Spelling
On Thursday the class got their new sorts.  They only had time to do one sort activity each day in order to allow us time to make our class book and do our journal writing.  We will spend more time with this sort next week.  I sent a copy of the sort list home on Thursday in their Take Home Folders.

 

Art

The first graders finished their Egyptian collars this week in art. We looked at examples of Ancient Egyptian jewelry again and noticed their colors and patterns. Then the students used cut paper, glitter, and “rhinestones” to decorate their collars. Next week I’ll take a picture of the students wearing these very creative Egyptian collars!